


Pretty Much Destroyed

by Zietegeest



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Getting Together, Ghosts, Hallucinations, Haunted Houses, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, M/M, Nightmares, Pararibulitis (Dirk Gently), Post-Canon, Post-Project Blackwing (Dirk Gently), Project Blackwing (Dirk Gently), Psychological Trauma, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements, Trauma, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:40:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 65,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24952444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zietegeest/pseuds/Zietegeest
Summary: The agency is hired by a new customer who sets Dirk on the search for a series of missing people.Clues lead to a strange house, seemingly abandoned in the city, and Todd notices Dirk seems to be using the case as a distraction from feelings he's trying to evade.But what lies within the growingly bizarre rooms? A solution to the case, or an answer to what Dirk is trying to run away from?
Relationships: Farah Black & Todd Brotzman, Farah Black & Todd Brotzman & Dirk Gently, Farah Black/Todd Brotzman (mentioned), Todd Brotzman/Dirk Gently
Comments: 47
Kudos: 38





	1. The New Case

**Author's Note:**

> hey so this was originally supposed to be a (under) 10k story with another person and plans changed, so the pacing at the start of this is godfuckingawful. if you get through the beginning, I won't say it 'picks up' but it does grow more into what it ends up being. things go on and keep on goin on and stop going when they stop, you know? if you're reading this and get through to the end leave a comment telling me I'm a jackass. after I scrapped the original 10k plan it really spun out and I have drafts of an alt chapter of what happens to dirk in chapter 7/8 and what happens between them some time after the ending, so anyone interested in reading that mess can comment telling me I'm a wormy compost bin. enjoy your day/night/non-segmented time lil buds.

When the woman had first approached the office with a thin folder and a fierce, desperate expression, it had felt official. 

The first case with the plaque on the wall, the first case that they hadn’t had to wander out and wait for a feeling to find. It felt like an offering. A sign - bold and underlined - that they’re in the right place, ready to do what they’re meant to be doing. 

_Here it is, open up and receive,_ some godlike thing reaching down with some cosmic boon. Custom made to fit them, in their custom-made agency. 

Purpose. Direction. Distraction. 

_Here, take this, chew on this, try this on for size._

Fulfillment. Reward. Redemption. 

Farah, Todd, and Dirk all regarded the woman with rapt attention as she walked in the door.

The folder had been thrust towards them, held in nervous hands. It hadn’t been a missing person’s flyer, but the essence was the same. A photograph, an address book, the hopelessness in the woman’s eyes. 

She introduced herself as Jolie Silberman. They took her in, essentially telling her with eagerness that they were on the case before she really had the chance to tell them what the case was. Her sister, Cece, she had told them, hadn’t been heard of in weeks. 

She hadn’t wanted to stay - despite the newly furnished area in front of the plaque. It had cushioned chairs, a decorative table, coasters and a bright window, shiny like the real thing. She sat, perched on the edge of her chair, back ridged like she was watching something suspenseful unfold on the big screen. She told them as much as she could without her voice cracking. 

“No one else will look for her. They think it’s just drugs. A suicide, a runaway.” Her eyes, large and dark and lined with late nights, scatter through the room to implore each of them. Farah had reflected her expression with a bold ferocity. Todd had been handed the folder, and was looking at the photograph of a younger woman, taking in their similarities, their differences. Dirk hadn’t blinked once since she had walked in. 

“This wasn’t a suicide. This wasn’t a runaway. What happened to my sister?” 

☛

The next morning Farah suggested checking out the address Jolie had left with them. Dirk had sat in the main waiting area, mirroring Jolie’s stature and fidgeting without purpose. When he hadn’t immediately responded to the proposed plan, Todd looked over to see him drumming his fingers against his leg, an uneven beat that made it halfway to chorus before Dirk bounded upwards. 

“I’ll do a coffee run! Heard that on TV,” he added in with a trying smile.

“You don’t like coffee,” Todd said at the same time Farah said, “we already have a coffee maker.” 

“I just feel like doing a coffee run.” There had been a spark of something in Dirk’s eye as he turned on his heels and made for the door. Todd and Farah exchange a glance that ends with Farah rolling her eyes, handing Todd a bill from the desk drawer.

Todd had chased Dirk out of the building, the other man not pausing for him to catch up, just keeping a brisk pace. Each one of Todd’s strides to match two of Dirk’s fast and narrow ones, bewildered but high on intent. 

Todd’s not unaware of the zigzagging route they’re taking, or how in the past ten minutes they’d already passed by several bakeries and coffee shops. Starbucks cropped up as quickly as weeds in the city, but they along with every corner store and gas station was ignored.

When Dirk finally stops in front of a shop, Todd’s relieved, but slightly underwhelmed once he gets his bearings. There’s a propped up sandwich board in front of a cafe declaring it open, but Dirk only stands outside, looking from the awning to the hand-drawn chalk sign, to the white floral etchings on the front windows. 

“Going in then?” Todd prompts at his side. He’s following the motions of Dirk’s gaze, a bit delayed, dwelling over the path.

“I... don’t want coffee,” Dirk says, turning his eyes towards Todd. He looks almost puzzled, head tipping forwards and away, like he’s leaning in to catch the sound of something distant that Todd can’t make out. He moves in a slow circle, eyes getting caught up in the flow of traffic, darting up to track along the lines of balconies and fire escapes lining the street. 

There’s a tall and stretching underpass on the other side of the intersection, a few cars are crawling over it when Todd first sees the man across the road. 

Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, Dirk and Todd hardly blend in with the steady, spaced out motion of the other people on the street. It’s the lack of blending in that makes the man walk over to them when he does. 

He’s older, existing in a matted grey area of middle aged and then some, walking with an uneven gait that’s more like a series of smooth lurches. There was a traveller’s pack slung over one shoulder like it was an extension of his body and a sharp, hyper-focused look in his eye, like he was tuning out the background and honing directly in on them. The collection of everything he was composed of that made Todd want to look the other way and avoid engaging.

“Got a smoke?” He asks in a deep and scratching voice, and Dirk is suddenly and completely tuned in to him. Leaning in with rigid posture, eyes no longer chasing the patterns of the cars and buildings. 

“No, sorry,” he replies, inching in closer. The man is entirely unbothered by the closeness of him, or the intensity of his gaze. An internal alarm is going off in Todd, who edges in closer to Dirk, ready to pull him back. Casual and complete tolerance was the wrong response to Dirk being so unapologetically _on,_ and in someone’s face. 

“Fine,” the man said, pulling a crumpled cigarette out of a pocket and letting it jut out from between his front teeth. “How about a light?” His untamed eyebrows raise in encouragement, amplifying Todd’s uneasy feeling. 

“Don’t have that either,” Dirk says. He’s still analyzing the man like he’s a specimen under a sheet of glass. Some great computer, with frequent blinking lights, processing. 

“Give us some change then, I know you’ve got that,” he fixes Dirk with a level stare. Expectant, and not unfriendly. 

“Alright. What can you trade?” Dirk says, straightening the lapels of his jacket, just as expectant. Todd gets the urge to pull him aside and tell him _that’s not how it works_ but then finds himself clamping down on his tongue with his teeth, because that’s exactly how _it_ works. Maybe how long it’s been has been just enough for Todd to almost have forgotten how it works. He feels on edge, on high alert, and keeping quiet seems like the safest role to play.

There’s a smell hanging like a cape around the man. A bone-deep muddy kind of smell, metallic, sharpened with musky notes of sweat and leather. 

The man bristles at Dirk’s words, and Todd thinks he’s offended at first, going to wander off and find someone who’s less of a waste of time. But then he preens, jostling his shoulders, like a magician preparing for a trick. 

He digs into the pockets of his overcoat, and when he pulls them back out, each hand is held in a fist, fingers pointed down, bulging out around whatever object is hidden underneath. 

Dirk is leaning in with an almost feverish intent, hungry for it, whatever it is, and Todd’s just hoping that it’s not going to open and display something terrible. Dirk’s hands go into his own pockets next, one coming out with a crisp bill, the other staying closed around a second item. He extends his hands too, mirroring the other man. 

Todd’s hand dives into the pocket of his jacket, not at all surprised to find it empty. He frowns a little, having missed the moment when Dirk had snatched the bill effortlessly from his pocket. It feels irrelevant, though, and hardly a shocking talent for Dirk to have. 

The man’s grin is full of gaps and he jerks a knuckle towards the money, and Dirk nods once, pointing towards his right hand. 

“A done deal,” the man says, flipping his wrist and opening his hand to reveal a short stack of white cards, smudged with dirt and whatever else had lined the insides of his pocket. 

“Just out of curiosity,” Dirk says, tilting his head to one side and making eyes at the man’s still closed left fist. He opens it to show a handful of air. 

“And?” The man asks, doing an exaggerated pantomime of Dirk’s motions. Todd faintly wonders if he’s at all aware he’s being made fun of. 

“Ah, yes, of course. If you have anything else interesting,” Dirk says, standing up a little straighter, looking somewhat pleased, presenting a business card with a flourish. The man plucks it from his fingers with an unimpressed air. 

And with that it’s over. The man heads off at an angle down the street, and Dirk is spinning, turning Todd’s shoulders around to face the way they came. 

☞

“You’re empty handed,” Farah observes dryly when they reenter the office. 

“That is the most incorrect observation you’ve ever made. You’re much better than that, Farah,” Dirk scolds, eyes alit with a bright energy. Farah’s face shifts a moment before Dirk is reaching into his jacket pocket. 

“You found something.”

“Oh, I found something.” 

“Technically he bought it from a tramp,” Todd supplies.

☝ ☝ ☝

The cards had been the last of the clues that had presented themselves. Farah had whipped up a spreadsheet in the time it had taken Dirk to fan the cards out on the tabletop. ID cards, and a search into each name had come up with the same results - either no results at all, or a dated, halfhearted ‘missing’ entry. So-and-so was last seen wearing... 

The last card in the stack belonged to Cecelia Silberman. 

It was like a gun had been fired, starting the race.

And the race sets off, taking them to Cecelia’s apartment. It had been almost haunting - the lack of furniture combined with the stale, empty air. They split up searching, though it doesn’t take long to thoroughly search through the cramped studio. 

A drawer is opened, and in the drawer had been a key. A key that matched a storage locker at the community centre in her neighbourhood. The locker had been empty, save for a few halfheartedly folded clothes, and a post-it note crumpled up in the corner. The note was a phone number, when dialled was a hiring agency. Inquiries at the agency had resulted in another dud. _Yes, we spoke with her. No, we didn’t place her. She hadn’t showed up for the orientation class. No, we don’t do followup due to how many people we have applying._ Thank you for your time. 

So they had backtracked. Back to her apartment - _there must have been something that we missed._ There’s another search, but there’s no eureka, no inklings, no coffee shop intuition. Just Cecelia’s empty apartment walls staring back at them blankly. 

And then it had gone dark and quiet. Dead ends met them in every door, scraps and possibilities stopped yielding anything of interest. It was like the universe had stretched out, yawned, and laid down to sleep. 

There had been pressure from the landlord to have Cece’s things moved from the apartment. The small amount of her belongings - about three moving boxes full - now sat in the corner of the agency’s main room, staggered out across the far wall. 

The boxes were as quiet as the case, minding their manners and collecting dust in the room. Weeks pass, days stacking up in an unassuming and invasive way. Farrah rapped her nails against the top of the desk, Dirk paced trenches into the floorboards, and Todd sat back, watching them both. It starts to blend into one long stretch of nothing really happening.


	2. The Last Weeks of Winter and First Weeks of Spring

Since getting him back from Blackwing Dirk had been more erratic than before.

Eagerly pressing into people in the commotion of the conversation or flare of the moment and then flinching back away, as if realizing his position, overcorrecting his energy. The jolt between the two actions was as if he was trying to be in two places at once, play two roles.

But it’s not until the identification cards come in and then nothing else does that he really seems to tip over into some other, murkier area, harder to pick apart and decipher, and harder to predict. 

Farah leaps into action in a way that Todd finds comfort in. Analytical, hard hitting facts, a by the books approach that no one even attempts to argue with. 

By the end of the first week of the cards appearing, she had a detailed list beside each name. Past addresses, occupations, anything waiting online to be dug up, now sitting excavated in a ruled notebook. 

By the end of the second week she had rarely been in the agency at all, out off on scouting missions to interview relative and neighbours - when either could be found at all. Each day stepping out with a loaded chamber and empty page, and coming back with both full. A few first hand accounts from neighbours, noting aloud how a distinct lack of friends had been waiting to be found. 

“Eerie,” she had summarized it. “Like they had disappeared way before they actually went missing.”

After the third week the information just stopped coming in, the well empty. Another shuffle through Cecelia’s belongings turned up nothing, and with no new leads, the case seemed to relax on the shelf, watching them smugly.

Dirk’s been restless, his hands never fully stilling at his sides. The antsy, almost nervous air around him has been tipping Todd off towards feeling guilty at the break, almost enjoying the time off. Farah seems to be seeing it that way too, after the initial tension - time to get organized, tackling things in a way that make sense. Todd reasons that it’s really just some time to catch their breath between things, but Dirk brushes off the concept that the lapse is a chance to relax. 

“We should be doing something,” he says when Todd attempts to suggest that he just take it easy for a while. 

“What, go somewhere?” Todd asks, and Dirk makes a frustrated sound. 

“No, not outside, not - not any tangible place I can make any sense of, at least, it usually comes on in this pull, not that that’s much use because I can never tell where it’s pulling me until I arrive there.” 

“So there’s no pull happening,” Todd tries to confirm, and Dirk just makes a sound again.

It’s the mundane strangeness that the trio seems to struggle the most with. 

Farah’s decisions to rearrange things. Furniture at first, and then paintings on the wall, moving on to kitchen cabinets and every piece of stationary and clutter until every flat surface is covered with partially sorted items. Pens by colour, tins of tea and biscuits by caffeine content and size accordingly. 

The rushed, impatient snaps of don’t _touch_ that, to _don’t touch anything!_ that have the others backing slowly out of the room, finding some other space to inhabit until she’s moved on to something else. 

There’s the morning that Dirk practically launches for the door after spending a full day and a half on the couch, barely stirring, eyes distant. When the others make to follow he brushes them off. 

“I just feel like some fresh air,” he says, and shoots down any offers for company rather brusquely.

“Or rather I really don’t feel like going for a walk at all, so I’m taking one anyway, because it doesn’t feel like anything at all is supposed to be happening,” he says quickly, curtly, and the door is slammed behind him before either Farah or Todd have any chance to interject. 

And there’s the night that Todd and Farah stay up talking about things, drink glasses collecting on the table under coasters that Farah seems to be conjuring out of thin air. Family, fathers, and the sour weighted shawl of disappointment seems to cinch a little looser around their necks. They talk about desperate moves made in the name of comfort, and how the consequences feel threadbare without the pointed horns of danger staring them down. And when morning creeps up on them it coats them in a different sort of light.

There’s a definitive feeling of change as the next day settles around them. Todd doesn’t try to fight the pang of some alternative loss, as Farah scrubs the feeling out from underneath her fingernails. 

As more days are crossed off the calendar, Dirk seems to be winding himself up more. He goes off on his own, creeping away from conversations. His meetings with the empty streets seem to be a distraction from the stagnant state of waiting inside the apartment. While Farah dismantles things indoors Dirk takes longer walks, longer showers, longer hours in front of the TV not really watching it. Todd brings them up, and Dirk shoots him down. _Just a bit antsy,_ he says. _It’ll be any day now._

Farah backs up this strange and hopeful statement with a similar tone. On edge, with positivity injected into the words. It feels strained, and Todd stays neutral. Stagnancy was familiar enough to him, despite everything Farah and Dirk had introduced him to. Though silently he sympathized, sitting back and watching their processes. The encompassing air of something waiting for them to find was hard to breathe, and Dirk was getting the worst of it.

He was always the first one up in the mornings, and the last one to retreat to bed. Todd starts to get suspicious that he’s sleeping at all, and when his aloof behaviour leans more towards jumpiness in the darker hours of the evening, he counts that as a confirmation.

There’s a tightness to the air, an undercurrent of tense energy inhabiting the rooms.

It brews in the way Dirk stands pressed into door frames, hands balled tightly in his pockets, the pressure still not enough to keep them from shaking. 

It stirs and breeds in the looks exchanged between Todd and Farah that Dirk seems to be immune from noticing - or expertly pretending not to see. He extracts himself from glances and checks out from conversations with such ease that the other two are left exchanging glances that weigh differently than they had before.

Then a blink, a breath, a new day and it’s gone, flashing itself out of existence, or at least under the rug and out of the way. Tea mugs line the kitchen counter with Farah being able to turn her back on them, Todd complains about the reality TV station but without enough investment to change the channel, and Dirk chatters on and kicks his feet up on the sofa, presumably hiding the remote beneath them.

It’s the pockets of good days that gives Todd the funny feeling that there are two versions of the other man, taking turns around the days like a sundial. 

There was the wired, so easily ecstatic version he had first met - the one who had made that initial imprint, bright in constant motion. 

And the still-new one he struggles with. The quiet side, illusive. The version who had dug a hole inside of him, tucked and burrowed, taking up as little space as possible.

Dirk holds himself in some positions and it’s like a grenade of memory has gone off inside Todd’s mind. An angle of his arms, crossed against his front, or an expression in the corners of his eyes, and it’s as if he’s painted in the corner of the Cardenas house, with Todd left wondering if he actually got out at all. The shrapnel buries itself, and Todd fills the silence trying to dig the feeling out.

The long and empty days has Todd feeling like an attack dog, muscles turning to stone, rigid waiting for a command that isn’t coming.

The season starts to twitch and change. The sun sticks around longer, and the trio stretch out reasons to stay up. 

Farah reviews her notes often enough that Todd reckons she could recite the notebook back to front with her eyes closed. She starts staying out later too, morning walks and evening hours at the gym. The restlessness encircles her like a halo. When she sits her legs stay in motion, tapping out the pace. All muscle without purpose, and Todd understands the frustration, and her impatience. It’s strange seeing her keep still and indoors, and the longer days, the brighter skies seem to amplify that. 

It takes a while of watching before Todd can really put a name to what he’s witnessing between the other two. It’s subtle, quiet and bored. Two people in the same room, not speaking, just trying to make themselves feel something. The realization doesn’t go anywhere. It just marinates in Todd’s head, and in the spaces on the clock.

Farah’s tension is something he can deal with. She’s sometimes explosive but so self-contained. There’s some barrier missing between them, and they take turns spinning the wheel and calling each other out. Destructive behaviour, familiar to someone who destructs in the same way, and they keep an eye on each other. A winter stuck inside, waiting so tensely for anything at all invokes some snappiness, but it breeds from a place of kindness, and it’s recognized, and easy to step around.

The apartment, at least in Todd’s mind, is becoming less easier to step around. It’s seven weeks after the visit from Jolie Silberman that each morning starts to feel dangerous in its emptiness. 

He wakes up and feels the breath hesitate in his lungs. He rises, and leaves his room, waiting for the action to give some colour back to the new day. The electricity that had bordered the cases before is so unignorably not present. It’s the thing that’s been dormant, missing like Cece Silberman, and Todd waits for it, feeling cooped up and on edge waiting for it. Every morning he’s expecting magic, explosives, trip wires fastened to the base boards. 

And the reality every morning that it’s still quiet, grey and unmoving feels heavy on his shoulders. 

The TV still on from the night before, commercials narrating the empty hours of night. Someone is reporting on the weather when Todd makes his way down the hall. Cool temperatures, gusts of wind, a medley of spring chaos. 

It’s the combination of the still grey mornings and Dirk’s rattling dance between cheery and vacant that make the mornings so uncomfortable for Todd. 

The time stretched out feels like more than enough to excuse Dirk’s behaviour, now and lately. It’s been long enough to have him itching for something to do, an incessant foot tapping beneath the table. Climbing up the walls, the temperatures thawing out the most restless parts of all of them.

The sound of Dirk’s approaching footsteps from his section of the apartment has Todd bracing against the counter to see which side he gets today. He watches Dirk round through the doorway, and catches a glimpse of something in between the two. It’s something not quite fully awake, edges blurred, hair uncombed and he gives Todd an unguarded smile that Todd doesn’t know what to do with. 

The days carries on like this. Quiet, uneventful, with Todd not knowing what he should be doing or how he should carry out not knowing what to do. 

The sun gives up trying to give him clues eventually, and night falls just as quietly. There’s such stillness in the air inside, the spaces between all of them, that the wind outside refuses to match. The sound of branches outside the windows seems to be rousing the uneasiness, like a fire-hot kettle on the stove. 

All of the off behaviour coming to a boil, rattling the windows in their frames. The weeks of stagnancy boiling over, a shrill whistle, steam billowing up and out and soaking everything and when Dirk slips into Todd’s bedroom it’s as silent as vapour. 

☞

“Todd, wake up,” Dirk is repeating, as Todd opens his eyes, adjusting to consciousness and the heavy lid of darkness in his room. 

“Dirk, wha - ?” Todd shifts up, propping his back against the wall. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong! Everything’s fine! We need to go, though, you need to get up and we need to go,” Dirk says brightly, the slight rasp in his voice the only giveaway to the hour, which Todd checks groggily on his phone, _3:27._

“Go where?” Todd asks as Dirk shuffles closer on the mattress. 

“Go...somewhere. To a place. Somewhere to a place for a thing, come on,” 

“Okay, Jesus, give me a second. Is Farah coming?” 

“I didn’t want to wake her up. You know she sleeps with at least one gun within reach, right?”

“Yeah, there’s usually a hunting knife under the pillow,” Todd says, cracking his neck and starting to shove the covers off of himself before pausing. “Can you get out for a minute? I have to get dressed.” Dirk looks slightly offended, but doesn’t argue, bouncing himself off the mattress and making for the door. 

Todd is halfway into a pair of jeans when he hears the front door open and close, and swears under his breath, rushing and scrambling to catch up. 

“What is this, where are we going?” Todd asks once they’re both outside, breathing heavily from his dash down the stairs. Dirk is standing in the road, empty and dark, with a sharp, hungry look in his eyes. 

“This way,” and with that he’s off. Not running, but not far off from it.

“Any idea what thing we’re looking for?” Todd asks. His eyes still feel bleary, slogged down trying to keep up with Dirk’s darting pace, while tracing the shadows of buildings and parked cars. 

“Something blew up against the window, I only saw it for a second, but it’s important, and we have to go find it.” Dirk says all of this hurriedly, with an impatient air that suggests that Todd should have known this already.

“Why were you looking out the window at three in the morning anyway?” Todd asks, the beat of his words weighed down with the intrusion from sleep. His footsteps feel the same. Heavy, trailing.

Dirk hesitates before answering. 

“Couldn’t sleep,” he says, and looks almost ready to say something else, when they cross the intersection and the draft of wind from an alleyway runs into them, the cold aid knocking Todd into being fully awake and stopping Dirk in his tracks. 

“What are you standing on, Todd?” 

“Huh? Oh,” Todd looks down, lifting his toes off the paper that was trapped beneath his shoe. Another ripple of wind came snaking out of the alley and curled around the edges, lifting it like a sail. The gust sends it off again on its path, down into the centre of the road where the traffic lights catch the side of it, illuminating it green and bright, and Dirk runs into the road without looking.

Todd follows at a jog, almost grateful for the hour, because he would have been otherwise flattened by traffic. 

“So? What is it?” Todd asks once he’s caught up again, a gut feeling already telling him that it’s case related, just based on how literally far behind Dirk he’s been since waking up. 

Dirk turns to look at him, ripped, dirt-streaked paper held triumphantly in both hands, and hits Todd with a wide, spreading smile. 

“It’s a construction notice.” The traffic lights, now red, light up his face with a neon flush.  
☛


	3. The Fence Before the House

The paper proves to be about two thirds of a construction notice. The bottom chunk of the page torn off in a jagged, angled line, unevenly severing the lines of text beneath an image of a basic 3D model of a condominium. 

There’s no address or company name, or anything that looks like actual information, but the lights are back on behind Dirk’s eyes, surging and electric blue. As far as Todd can tell, it doesn’t help them get ahead of anything, that a piece of non-information is a setback more than anything else, but he doesn’t bring it up. Farah’s search online proves futile - the nonstop construction of buildings across the city narrows down nothing at all, and Dirk basically scolds her for the attempt. 

Adding the construction of a condo into the mix of clues still hinders more than helps, but Dirk doesn’t seem capable of seeing it that way. All the parts that look like dead ends fall to pieces as soon as any research attempts are so much as pointed their way, but that frustrated, stagnant feeling seems to be gone from it, all at once. 

Dirk rattles off possibilities instead, starting with acceptable notions, and straying further and further off into unpredictable waters. 

“Maybe, all these missing people are actually living together in this newly built condominium that automatically locks behind anyone who moves in,” he suggests one morning, and falls conveniently deaf to any followup suggestions about how they proceed to prove that. 

They’re no closer to putting anything together than they had been in the dull, vacant weeks previously as far as Todd can tell.

But Dirk’s been riding out a high going onto three days now, with Todd’s been watching him from the corners of his eyes since the morning of the second day.

In turn, Farah has been watching the monitor screens, making notes in a document to one side, and adding marks to the city map spread out across her desk. 

Todd can practically taste the electricity radiating off the two of them from the opposite sides of the agency. The current that sits pulsing in the air over the case feels so much like standing on the edge that the bottom of his stomach feels just about like dropping out. 

As unpredictable as their situations tend to be, he’s desensitized to the strangeness just enough to know that their are only ever two possible outcomes when the edge is this close.  
Either a crescendo of action happens next - a call to arms, a myriad of twisting clues, cardio and bruises.

Or a burnout. 

It’s not until Dirk begins upending the boxes that Todd starts smelling smoke, and recruits Farah to help him step in. 

Farah approaches slowly, like confronting a cornered stray. 

“What are you looking for?” she asks, and Todd edges closer, watching as Dirk comes to his knees, shuffling a stack of papers, spreading them out across the floor.

“Anything that connects Cece to a renovated condominium,” Dirk says, not pausing in his motions, fanning through pages, seemingly documenting each one with a single blink.

“Well, I already made a file of all the paperwork we found. Nothing mentioned a condo,” Farah says. She says it cautiously, like she’s navigating around his energy, not wanting to disrupt the process, if there was something there she had missed. Todd doubts it somehow.

“Not that she was really giving off ‘condo vibes,” he chimes in. 

“What are ‘condo vibes?’” Dirk asks, but doesn’t pause for anyone to answer. “Did Cece know about the building development? What are they building there? _Why aren’t they building there?_ What used to be there that isn’t there anymore? What does any of it have to _do_ with Cece?” Dirk turns to look at them, wild-eyed and upright, and slumps back in a sort of sulk when he’s met with silence. 

“Well chime in any time, Todd,” he says, sounding much more disappointed than defeated.

“I don’t know,” Todd counters back. “When do I ever know anything? I don’t know anything.” Farah sighs heavily at this, directing it at both of them before stalking back to the desk to get the torn construction notice.

“Here, look at the diagram of the condos, that gives us the dimensions, right?” She doesn’t walk back into the room with them, and Dirk leaps to his feet, striding back over to the desk. It’s a tactic to get him to leave the boxes, and Todd’s impressed by how seamlessly it’s worked.

“Come look at this,” Farah says next, and Todd joins them at the desk, the boxes left overturned.

The ID cards are laid out across the city map, each sitting next to a red marking on the page. 

“I marked the locations that each missing person was last seen. I got a few from asking around, and found the rest online - ”

“Say you hacked into the police files,” Todd says, and Farah draws her lips together in a flat line. Todd counts his victory.  
“Any chance the lot that fits those dimensions is within this radius?” 

“Not sure ‘chance’ is the right word, but I’d think the odds are fairly high,” Dirk is saying, edging closer to the table, eyes drawing a circle around the red marks. He weaves in between Farah and Todd and comes to a stop in between the two, angled in a way that keeps his shoulders drawn up, not touching either of them but flanked tightly on both sides. 

“Let’s sleep on it, regroup in the morning,” Farah says, and Todd’s relieved at the direction. 

Dirk’s face falls incrementally, but he swiftly covers it with a plastered on smile, saying his goodnights and weaving from the room like he had never really been there. 

The night passes much as the past hundred nights had passed, with Todd falling asleep wondering how days filled with not much at all can feel so draining. 

☞

The hallway feels dreamlike as Todd weaves his way from his bedroom into the agency. The tiles stretch out in the strands of early morning light, his body shaking off the webs of sleep. 

Farah watches him enter the room over the rim of her coffee cup. She’s propped against the kitchen counter, posture militarian even at rest, and it puts Todd on edge immediately. “What’s going on?” he asks, and is a bit surprised when she extends an arm and holds out the pot of still steaming coffee in an offering motion. 

“No idea,” she responds, taking another short drink from her cup. A thump almost identical to the one that had woken Todd sounds out, and he chases it into the repurposed living room.

Dirk is standing over a sprawling mess of items, the contents of Cecelia Silberman’s life all freshly overturned on the floor. 

Standing backlit from the windows, the starkness of the morning outside highlights the contrast in his face, deepening smudges beneath his eyes, the manic fray to his pupils, like they’re startled by the light. 

“Jesus, Dirk, did you sleep at all last night?” Todd asks, slow in his approach into the room. 

“What? Why? What time is it?” Dirk asks back, in uninterested hurry. 

“It’s after eight,” Todd replies. “What are you looking for?” Todd’s aware he’s dodged the question, but unsure of how to redirect. There’s a stiff line of tension running alone Dirk’s back, tight like a stringed instrument, and it narrates his erratic movements like a high strung composer.

“If I knew that I probably would have found it the first few times I went through this stuff,” Dirk rockets back, standing up, straightly and suddenly, and toeing at a cheap plastic snow globe. The flurries inside match the atmosphere in the newly sunlit room. Cold, and quick.

Todd watches as the fake snow settles in the globe. He’s hoping that Dirk will settle too. 

Dirk’s standing with a frustrated scowl directed at the unhelpful items strewn across the floor. His hands are knotted tightly in his pockets, and seeing them has Todd consciously releasing the way he’s holding his hands at his sides, stiff and gripping.

It’s strange seeing him so tightly wound and almost angry. Uneven lines of heat rising off of him distorting the edges of the room around him. He’s burning, warping, like a flat stretch of summer highway. 

But there’s something else amid the flickering aura of frustration. Snow trapped behind glass, desperate to catch the light. 

Todd is stunned into silence , startled by the light, the dawning of something onto Dirk’s expression. The annoyance drips away, and Todd watches him, his own eyes widened and unblinking. In the frame of seconds - the flakes still moving slightly in the snow globe - it’s as if Dirk’s mind has been cast out, eyes catching sight of something far away. A flash - the shimmer of light now _caught_ now present in the man’s eyes. Dirk’s lips part, his gaze shifting back into the room, catching hold of Todd too.

And Todd knows what he’s going to say before he says it. Not the exact phrase, or the direction, or anything he can really put to words, but it’s a sensation he watches collect on top of the other man, spreading out to him like an electrical current. 

“I feel like going out,” is what Dirk ends up saying, and the fine hairs along the base of Todd’s neck as well as the skin above his spine all respond with a fierce prickle. If pressed, he’d say that it felt that way a fraction of a second before Dirk spoke at all, shocked to attention. 

“You feel like going out, or you feel like it’s part of the case?” Farah asks. It’s another pluck at the string of tension Todd had been watching build up along between the expanse of Dirk’s shoulders. Despite the light, the shimmer, the snow settling behind the glass, the annoyance and frustration - all of winter’s residue - is all very much present, perhaps bigger and brighter, angry itself for being ignored. 

“Do you file your feelings, Farah? Do they end up colour coded, so you can just immediately know what they’re supposed to mean?” 

Farah wrinkles her nose at the words, as if recoiling from the brunt of them.

“I don’t think you meant for that to sound so - ” Cruel, was the word she was going to say, and Todd knew it, raising his eyebrows at her with a helpless shrug as she trails off. Her gaze brushes over him, then hones back in on Dirk. He’s already miles away, and picking up speed.

Todd has half formed a thought about how he’s getting all these notions about what people want to say. Like maybe being around magic and premonition has started to rub off on him. It’s not a full, cohesive thought, just flashes of everything, of Amanda and the pool in the woods, but that hurts to think about, and he can hear Dirk running down the stairs, and Farah saying his name, calling him back in. 

“Go with him,” Farah says, the slamming of the front door punctuating her words, and Todd nods in agreement, already moving to follow the noise. 

Dirk’s already halfway down the street, head fixed in place like a bloodhound. Todd kicks himself into gear to catch up, less sure that he’s actually got the scent of something, and more to keep him from getting lost in the woods. 

Todd chases him, feeling the bite of the breeze against his face. Warm air but cold wind, that strange medley, the in between breath of seasons, winter’s shadow searing through his lungs. 

He keeps chasing him, even after catching up, thinking they’d connect and carry on at the same pace. 

But Dirk seems hellbent on tail-gaiting the urge to the unknown destination, moving almost at a run, but not quite fast enough to justify Todd running along after him. If he’s even pleased that Todd’s followed him, he can’t quite tell, though he does give him a rapid sideways glance, and one brisk line of _‘come on then!’_

He’s been slower since the bullet wound, but still those infuriating inches taller that make Todd’s legs ache to match his longer, not-yet- running strides. 

Neither of the pair exchange any other words until they’re just past the cafe from day’s earlier, standing at the inner corner of the same intersection. Dirk comes almost screeching to a stop, and Todd copies, pausing to check the asphalt beneath them for skidding tracks. 

“Someone’s watching us,” Dirk says easily, and Todd jumps, suddenly acutely aware of his stance, the feeling of the ground beneath his shoes, and the distance between them on the street. 

Watchdog, he thinks. Suddenly, irrationally, but the word crops up and sticks as he scans the area, one eighty degrees around the back of Dirk, whose eyes are still and cast low in front of Todd, head cocked, listening for something. They’re both breathing too heavily to be subtle, and Todd’s grateful for the empty street, though instantly suspicious from Dirk’s words.

The image of a chained dog follows the thought, staking claim in Todd’s mind. The stiffness to his legs, grounding him, braced and ready to run, and he thinks of clawed feet, gripping the earth, snouted and snarling. A figure catches his eye, a little hunched and at a far enough distance that it blended into the shadows of the ridges and pillars beneath the overpass. 

“The overpass,” Todd says, keeping his voice low. “There’s someone there.” Dirks makes a noise, a small, confirming _hm_ that Todd wishes felt a little less like a pat on the head. Nonetheless, the hairs on the back of his neck lower. 

“Is it the man we met before?” Dirk asks, and Todd looks away from the figure to contemplate him. His posture suddenly seems unnaturally straight, one leg cocked out to the side in a replica of a natural pose that, in the sunlight, on the pavement, looks anything but. Todd had opened his mouth to say something, some rebuttal, some sarcastic quip along the lines of _how could I possibly know who it is from this distance?_ but doesn’t. He gets caught up in the moment, the stillness of the street, the way Dirk is standing, stiffly, like a child frozen in a game of statue tag. When he looks back to the shadows beneath the overpass, he startles slightly to see that the figure had begun crossing the distance between them, steadily approaching. And that it was, of course, the man from the weeks before. 

Dirk turns, considering Todd’s expression for a moment before raising an arm in greeting. 

“Dirk Gently,” the man says carefully, eyeing up Todd in a cautious manner. 

“Hello again,” Dirk says, “and you are?”

“Benny,” the man says gruffly after a moment’s hesitation. It’s a name made up on the spot, Todd’s sure of it. 

“I’m empty handed this time, I’m afraid,” Dirk says. 

“I’m not,” the man says back, reaching into his jacket and Todd steps in closer to Dirk, ready to pull him out of the way, of what he’s not certain of. All the man pulls from his pocket is another card, which he extends to Dirk, who accepts it like he’d been waiting for it. Todd supposes that he has been.

“Where are you finding these?” Dirk asks curiously. “And did you know any of these people?” He looks at the card in his hand for a moment, turning it over with relative interest before looking back up at the man. He’s quiet, looking between the two and up and down the empty street before replying, but he doesn’t answer either question. 

“I kept away, didn’t want to draw anymore attention to myself,” the man calling himself Benny starts. His voice is harsh, weathered and pitched lower, as if sheltering their conversation from unseen elements. 

It hits Todd then - washes over him, at least, how far his way of thinking has strayed. Someone with no fixed or findable name, no permanent residence, had shown up out of nowhere with physical ties to several missing people, and he hadn’t given him a second thought. No air of suspicion, no accusation. He reckons he’s handling that breed of change easier than Farah is. The gun in the bedside table, the kitchen cupboards. 

“They weren’t the only ones.” The man ducks his head down, looking over his shoulder beneath the underpass as if something hidden in the shadows was calling out to him. The wind picked up then, jetting a cold ghost of winter across the asphalt towards them. 

“They weren’t the sort of people that anyone would miss,” he continues, and Dirk seems to latch on to this, bracing against the wind by leaning into Todd, his eyes transfixed and not leaving the man’s face. 

“No one missed them. No one went looking for them. Otherwise this whole place would be a swarm of cops and posters.”

“How many more people do you think are missing?” Todd asks. It’s the first thing he’s said to the man, he realizes, and the man seems to as well, turning to look at him like it’s the first time he’d really noticed he was there. 

“Half dozen? At least. Those cards, they’re all from the old house on Rafferty Place. At first folks thought it was one of those drop off places. People were squatting in there for a while, but none stayed long who didn’t go missing either. I never went in further than the entrance. That’s where the clothes and the wallets were.” 

“Why do you think no one stayed there?” Todd asks. He doesn’t want to fixate on the rest of it, but he can feel the man’s words creeping into the back of his mind, taking up residence. 

“The ones that came back out, they were all talking about _things,_ most raving mad sounding, and - ” Benny then cuts himself off, cutting off his sentence with a coughing fit that Todd is almost certain is put on. “People don’t like being in there.” 

“Well you’ve been there, did you happen to see anything - ” Todd trails off as well, with a hand gesture that he hopes is vague enough to prompt some kind of answer. 

“A girl,” he says, and Dirk sends Todd a radiating look, an _aha!_ sort of flash in his eyes. It catches him off guard. A tidal wave, conjured from a drought.

“That girl you saw, did this happen to be her?” Dirk asks, reaching into his pocket for what Todd knows is going to be the photograph of Cecelia that Jolie had given them. But Benny is shaking his head, raising his hands in a _hold off_ gesture before Dirk has the chance to show him. 

“The girl I saw died over twenty years ago.” 

Just then a truck horn blares from the top of the underpass, making the three of them jump and the man’s eyes to get darker, closing off with a look as unreadable as Dirk’s expression to the untrained eye. 

But Todd’s been trained, well enough that he can feel his hackles raising at what he picks apart from the man’s face.

 _I don’t want to be next._

☛

The can’t pull anything else useful from the man after that. He brushes away Dirk’s further questions, shutting down, backing up until he’s vanishing into the shadows again, and Todd gets the feeling that trying to track him down again would prove futile. 

“Right,” Dirk says, sounding more than a little disappointed once it’s just the two of them again, their shadows twisting together on the grey asphalt. “Rafferty Place.” 

☛

Todd had punched the street name onto his phone behind Dirk’s back. Every other part of his mind had been thoroughly convinced already, but the action served more for his own ever-loosening grip on the mundane reality of the city. 

And with every abrupt turn the detective made, every side street he swept them down had Todd double checking his screen, confirming they were weaving a jagged but undeniable route towards the destination. 

They wander through the streets, Todd keeping a few paces behind, if for lack of any other reason to observe the whirling pattern to Dirk’s path. He keeps wheeling from left to right across the street, sniffing out some trail unseen to either of them. His movements stay erratically focused, desperate to follow an outline that Todd can’t see, though he follows dutifully. It’s the silence more than the path that’s nagging at him. 

The sun sketches its way across the sky. It sits low and contemplative.

The neighbourhoods they were crossing through became more and more industrial the longer they walked. Todd’s about to ask something useless, some version of _where are we going? Are we almost there?_ when they come to a four-way stop. Todd looks at his phone, up at the street signs - Rafferty Place and Deagle Road. Dirk’s already turned left onto Rafferty without looking. 

The street itself is uninspiring. Silent - the chatter from the passing cars seem to be reserved for the busier roads, mostly at their backs now. “Here we are,” Dirk says, breaking the silence to jut his chin upwards at a street sign like an afterthought. It certainly reads Rafferty Place, and Todd’s not sure why he’s slightly disappointed at how rundown and ordinary the area looks. Decidedly not fantastical, but he doesn’t mention it. 

The buildings on the street were widely spread out, windows small and unfriendly. Todd gets the idea that if they could have chosen to space themselves further away from each other they would have. It’s not unlike how Dirk’s been, itching to press more distance between him and the people around him, like them breathing too close would scare away the threat of something happening next, and continuing the game.

Todd isn’t sure what game he’s been playing - continuing to play as Todd watches, practically skipping to get ahead of him, a ricochet of small stones as he moved into the winding line of the street. Todd isn’t even sure if he’s winning.

Another round of who can stay awake the longest, possibly. They’d been walking for hours, Todd figures, a slippery rush of tiredness forming around his ankles, and the balls of his feet. But the show marches on in the space he takes to pause. 

Todd breaks into a jog to keep up, suddenly no longer wanting to be lingering so far behind. Something about the empty holes between the buildings, the traffic sound falling away behind them makes him relieved when Dirk finally comes to a stop ahead of him. 

Dirk stands with a sway to one side - still favouring the leg he’d taken a bullet in, jutting the other into the ground like an anchor.

“Look,” Dirk points, and Todd’s already looking. The carved out empty gravel lot, surrounded by a rectangle of chainlink fence holding it in away from the rest of the block. A solitary house in the middle of it, looking humdrum and a season or two away from falling to pieces.

Todd checks the GPS on his phone just to confirm the inkling. He barely grimaces in recognition to find they’re dead in the centre of where Farah’s red markings sat on the map. 

The fence itself looked in good enough shape - not sparkling, but not rusted either, with no holes or tears to it. The front gate was padlocked shut with a fresh looking lock, but the tops of the fencing hadn’t been lined in wiring. And there was enough of a gap between the corner poles to easily imaging someone prying the sides apart and squeezing their way in without much effort.

Something was shifting under the pressure of the breeze, stuck to the front fencing. Todd doesn’t have to get close enough to read it to know that it’s the other piece of the torn paper. He walks up to face it head-on anyway.

Dirk slides in next to him, snaking like the wind. Pinning his shoulder against Todd’s, he reaches out to tap at the bottom line of text. 

“The date says construction was meant to start almost two months ago.” He reaches out, taps the text. _Effective Immediately._ Todd turns to look at him, and sees reflected in his eyes the same expression on his own face. A swirling mix of so many pieces to a puzzle, all questions no answers.


	4. Recompense (oh, maybe not tonight)

Dragging Dirk away from the construction site had been a task in of itself. It takes Todd more reasoning than usual to point out the levels of the bad idea barging in would be - scaling a fence in the failing daylight to dive headfirst into an abandoned house. 

“You can stay here, I’ll just go in and check it out - ” Dirk says, already prying apart the corners of the fencing. 

“The _hell_ Dirk, I’m not waiting outside,” Todd protests, indignant, a dog tied to a telephone pole. 

“No sense in both of us making the dive into the unknown - ” and Todd has to reach out and grab the back of his jacket, keeping him from slipping through the gap. 

“Fuck that. We’re going back to the agency, we’re filling Farah in. We can come back when it’s the three of us. You have no idea what’s going to be in there!” 

“Unhand me, Todd! I’m blazing a trail!” 

“No, you’re being an idiot. Let’s regroup and come back with a better plan. And a flashlight,” Todd adds. It takes a series of Tasmanian devil motions to loosen Dirk from the chainlink fence, but he manages, and Dirk reluctantly follows his gaze up to the rapidly darkening sky. A brief struggle, a surrender, and Todd rings up a car to get them back home before absolute nightfall. 

☞

Back through the doors of the agency, Dirk immediately launches into an unconvincing speech as to why they should turn straight back around and investigate. Farah’s attempts to cut him off prove unsuccessful, until Todd chimes in and outnumbered, he gives up. Long enough to breathe, at least. 

“And what have we got, exactly?” Farah asks, folding her arms across her torso and raising her brows expectantly in the following silence. 

“A stack of cards, some dots on a map, and two torn pieces of paper,” Todd supplies, then frowns when Dirk shoots him a witheringly betrayed look. “But like, significantly. These are significant things.” 

“You’re also leaving out the piles of clothes and articles from missing person’s in an abandoned house in the middle of a construction site, with no sign of police attention, and a starting date dated two months ago,” Dirk says, cramming the words together without taking a single breath. “I don’t know what else _you_ need but _I’m_ ready, _let’s go!”_

“First thing in the morning,” Farah says with an air of authority that Todd can’t help but to relax at. “Let’s make sure we have everything we need.” She’s making up a checklist behind her eyes, he knows this. 

Dirk is ignoring her, and him, though that’s been going on all day. It’s too spaced out to be taken personally, and Todd’s concerned more than anything, watching from the sidelines as Dirk gears up further, though his engine is starting to sound flooded. 

“I was thinking maybe some big suspicious condominium that was really a guise for a top secret evil lair. Or, tricking people into signing a builder’s contract then exploiting for slave labour! Maybe they’d be building some elaborate maze that traps people. But that’s not it! It’s not _creation,_ it’s _destruction!_ ” He’s gaining speed, locking in to the idea and Todd feels like backing out of the room, letting the two conflicting powerhouses sort themselves out. But he can’t turn away from the impending wreckage. 

“If we leave right now, we can get in and have a quick look around - ” Dirk is saying. He’s only revving up, gaining traction. 

“First thing in the morning, once we go in _prepared,_ sure!” There’s a put-on brightness to her tone that Todd instantly hates. He can hear the horns and sirens blaring. He hates that it’s a necessity, talking someone off their own self imposed ledge. He feels tired, dizzy in the face of an oncoming collision. Between a semi-truck and a sports car, neither showing signs of slowing. 

“Go in, get out, just scope the place out. Quick. Fast. Easy. Incremental - ” Dirk is saying. There’s fluid leaking onto pavement, a flammable trail that Todd can see like an aura. 

“That house hasn’t gone anywhere since it was abandoned in the first place, and there’s no sign that construction was going to suddenly start up again tomorrow,” Farah says. She’s deescalating, flashing her floodlights, but Dirk’s wheels are greased up and defiant of impact. 

“But it’s so _there!_ ” Dirk protests and the snow is whirling behind the glass again, and this time it’s a blizzard, a whiteout on the freeway with no signs of settling. 

“No one’s going to know that we held off for a few hours,” Todd says, and it feels so much like throwing a cup of water into an inferno. A bystander, trapped behind the guardrail. 

“You don’t know that,” Dirk says, a heated hiss, like water escaping a bursting pipe. And he’s smiling, almost laughing when he says it, but there’s nothing else in his tone or on his face that feigns he thinks it’s something funny. More sirens now, but they’re too far out. They’ll never make it in time.

“What’s gotten into you?” Farah asks, and it’s not a snap, but crossly framed concern. Todd finds it feels a little sharp around the edges, maybe payback for the tone Dirk had been falling into lately. The not meaning to be cruel but also not noticing. Dirk doesn’t seem to notice the edge either, and turns to face her at an angle, almost pleading. Hazards flashing. 

“Everything we’ve found so far has been telling me I’m on the right path, I’m doing something _right!_ I can’t ignore that.”

“We can do something right tomorrow,” Todd says, raising his hands in a peace-making gesture. “It’s late, we’ll all be sharper after some sleep - ”

“Which you have not been doing enough of lately,” Farah chimes in, and Todd grimaces, knowing before Dirk reacts that it was the wrong thing to say. It’s the final sound of tires streaking black against the road, before the glass explodes. Despite his knowing feeling, Todd’s still not expecting the reaction that follows. The crushing blast of impact. 

“I don’t need either of you to tell me when to go to bed or when to get up!” Dirk snaps. It’s childlike, but there’s no air of petulance to it, just one quick lash. Fierce, sudden, and Todd can smell the burning rubber. 

Dirk seems to hear it the same way they do, or he catches it inside the quick look that Todd and Farah exchange - furrowed, a hot breath of worry - and he clamps his mouth shut before anything else gets out. He sagged forward, shaking his head as if to dispel the conversation from his shoulders. A twist of crumpled metal, a plume of smoke. 

In the air of their silence, it’s as if someone had let all the wind out of Dirk’s sails - tires - and he crossed the room to sit on the far cushion of the sofa. There he sat, stilling in the water. Smouldering at the side of the road. 

“It’s just nice to do something right for once. Considering all I ever do is mess things up and ruin people’s lives,” Dirk says - almost airily, but there’s too much joking cadence in his voice for Todd’s liking. It’s put on, and he’s not laughing. Neither is Farah, who uncrosses her arms.

“I know you want to solve this, I was going stir-crazy waiting for the ball to start rolling too. But we’re not going to be any use if we’re tired and getting on each other’s backs for no reason. So get some rest.” She says it with finality. Conviction. It’s a fatal shot of logic that Todd takes in without breathing, waiting for the response. Eighteen wheels, backing off the scene. 

Dirk straightens his shoulders, squaring up to something, then hesitates, dropping them back down and sinking back into the press of the couch cushions. In the moment he looks defeated, like he’d been waging some battle inside his own head and only now found out he had lost. 

“I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m acting rashly. First thing tomorrow.” 

Farah nods, looking at him for a beat longer than usual before turning to head back into the apartment, towards her room.

Todd lingers in the doorway too, unsure what he’s waiting for at first. The agency’s main area is now cast in shadows, and they fold around Dirk on the sofa. By the time it clicks in - his own hesitance to leave - it feels like the night has stretched out entirely, staking its claim on the darkened room. It’s the same feeling he’s been grappling with since the case started. How he’s been a step behind the other man, chasing Dirk out of the apartment, down the street, pulling him off of the fencing. 

He doesn’t trust that if he retreats back into his bedroom, Dirk won’t go tearing off into the night alone, a non-jagged path this time, straight into the construction site and into the house alone. It’s a lousy thought to have, but once he acknowledges it, it sets up camp in the front of his mind, and won’t let him leave the doorway. 

Instead, he watches Dirk in silence, taking in the way he’s trying to look somewhere that isn’t his direction. But subtlety doesn’t fit, and Todd makes the decision to cross into the shadows and sit on the opposite end of the couch. 

He wants to ask what’s going on, in a manner maybe a touch less accusatory than Farah had asked, but the same strain. Wants to ask why he’s been so hot and cold, why such a drastic change from his usual - and Todd refuses to start thinking of it as his _old_ \- self. How the person sitting beside him now, not meeting his eye is so _quiet_ in the gaps between the day, when once Todd hadn’t been able to shut him up at all. He opens his mouth, closes it, wondering how to put it into words without sounding incredibly offensive. The active press to not be such an asshole, and the strain of it is muddy, clouding through his thoughts.

While he’s mulling it over, Dirk shifts on the sofa, edging himself an inch closer to Todd’s end. He composes himself so quickly Todd’s left wondering if he imagined the movement entirely. 

“When you said no one would no if we held off a few hours,” Dirk starts, plucking his words carefully, still not turning to look at Todd. “Where do you pull that from?”

“I don’t know,” Todd answers after a moment. “Somewhere instinctual, I guess? There’s no sense of impending doom. Not any more than usual, at least. Why, do you - ” Todd pivots in his position, turning to face Dirk head on, and meeting his side profile. “Do you have something telling you otherwise?”

“I think - ” Dirk starts, swallows, picks up again. “I think it’s after having nothing to go on, and then getting something, I hate having to wait for it. There’s the things that I _know_ I need to act on straight away, and there’s the things that just _feel_ like I need to. I can tell the difference. I’m just not good at acting on it. I’m still not used to having anyone around to make me step back from it.”

“How do you separate them, anyway?” Todd asks. It’s the smallest thing to focus on from the onslaught of words Dirk’s just dropped in his lap, more than he’s heard him speak all day in one sitting. 

“I don’t know, Todd,” Dirk says, suddenly sounding like the past three days have caught up with him all at once, cornering him and dousing him with a cold rush of exhaustion. “Some things just make themselves be known to me. I just end up knowing things that I rarely ask to know.”

A creeping spread of silence comes on then. It feels almost lethal in the dark, like the cold snout of a revolver is pointed between them, needling back and forth. The quiet stretches out until Todd’s not certain he has any of the tools it would take to break it. He ends up not needing too.

“Like the way I know that you sitting here is to make sure I don’t run off,” Dirk says. It’s quiet, a silencer on the muzzle, and Todd feels the bullet enter his stomach, lodging in his spine and preventing him from getting up. 

“Can you promise that you won’t?” He asks, going for light and ending up somewhere closer to careful, a bit amazed that Dirk had paralyzed him so easily. 

“I think so,” Dirk says, softer than the rest. He’s still looking ahead, eyes tracing patterns in the coffee table.

“Are you going to sleep out here?” Todd asks. He’s not sure what to do if Dirk answers yes. Get Farah, perhaps, and set up camp in front of the door. Though doors hadn’t been much use to stop Dirk in the past. Sleep in shifts then, maybe. 

“No, I just - ” Dirk shakes his head. “Wanted some company, I guess.” Todd bites his tongue, wanting to point out that they’ve been together all day, and not only had Dirk made no effort to speak with him, he had made a valiant effort in putting as much space between them the entire time. 

“Sure. You’ve seemed... tense lately,” Todd says in place of any of that, treading carefully. He’s unsure how far the need for company spills into the need for conversation. And not sure past that how much conversation would start to feel like pulling teeth. “I figured that was from the lack of clues.” 

Dirk opens his mouth to speak, but shuts it a breath later. Todd can feel the darkness closing in again, and wants so desperately to shake it off. 

“Can I - ” Dirk starts, then stops again, making Todd feel like he’s riding passenger seat in a car with choppy brakes. And then the engine revs back to life, and Dirk is standing in one jerky motion, sidestepping twice and sitting back down, hip and shoulder pressing almost weightlessly against Todd’s. 

“It’s Blackwing,” Dirk says once seated, and Todd is too preoccupied with the sudden invasion of space to do anything but nod. 

“Being back there after so long, and doing hundreds of those stupid _stupid_ tests, getting everything wrong...” he trailed off, stumbling back into the silence that Todd found so unsettling in how much it didn’t suit him. It sits around them for a while, daring Todd to touch it. He finds he can’t.

“And now I finally have the chance to _do_ something.” Dirk says after a while, letting out a breath that he had been holding on to. It came out evenly, but something in his shoulders shook slightly, just once. 

Todd’s far from unaware that it’s the first mention of Blackwing since they left the place, but entirely unaware of what to say next. Instead, he raises an arm awkwardly, letting it pat at Dirk’s shoulder, the one not lightly pinned to his side. 

“You never bring that up,” Todd says, trying to feel out whether Dirk is getting more or less wound up. “Is that what’s been...” he cuts himself off before saying _making you act like this_ , hastily replacing it with, “on your mind lately?” 

“I never brought it up because it never seemed relevant,” Dirk says. There’s a weird defensive edge to his tone, like the blade of a knife, pointing away from the conversation. Out of the room and through the door and down the road. But the angle of his body says otherwise, open and leaning slightly now, the warmth spreading into Todd grippingly.

“The feelings you have are usually relevant,” Todd says. He feels almost entirely out of his depth, that smaller, shrinking, selfish part of him just aching for his bed, to close his eyes and drift off for the night. He banishes this thought to the corner without much effort, and finds that Dirk is shifting, turning to look at him in the dark. The shadows holding council beneath his eyes.

“They don’t have to be big gift-wrapped case-related hunch sort of feelings,” Todd continued. His hand on Dirk’s shoulder travels south, sweeping a large and what he hopes is comforting circle through the fabric of his shirt. “The other ones tend to count for something too.” 

Dirk seems to dwell on this for a moment. 

“Thanks, Todd. See you in the morning.” And with that he’s standing, turning on his heel and walking into the lightless apartment, leaving Todd a little thrown, off balance and off kilter in the dark.


	5. The House Behind the Fence

The next morning comes on and it feels electric. 

Todd had slept lightly, his dreams feeling see through and waiting to drop the veil in an instant at the sound of a slamming door. 

That sound doesn’t come, and he’s able to convince his mind to let down enough of a guard to catch some kind of rest. The off-brand version of a proper night. The next sound he does pick up on semi-consciously is instead the sound of someone walking from down the hall at an ungodly hour, though they’re modest enough to let the sun rise first. 

It’s Farah, based on the rhythm of the steps, and Todd comes to thinking of how wordless people’s tells are. 

He follows the ghosts of her footsteps a little later, when the sun has crept a little further over the horizon, and a gauzy-pink stain of light is dancing around the windowsills. 

Farah is set up at the front desk, papers spreading over the desktop and multiple tabs glaring and open on the computer. 

Getting closer, he can see that the active file is all addresses, jobs, a jotted bullet list of possible motives. 

It’s impressive by sheer quantity, and more so because of the amount of time and organization she had directed to it. It all makes Todd feel entirely useless. 

On the kitchen counter, the coffee maker is humming to itself. Todd’s bottle of medication is tucked off to the side amongst the scattering of K-cups. Todd pours himself a mug while Farah offhandedly asks how things went the night before. He answers honestly - “it was like spoon feeding someone sleep.” She hms an understanding sound, and accepts his offering motion for another cup of coffee. 

They stay like that together, Farah at the desk and Todd still slowly waking in the doorframe. There’s a goldness to the air around them, basking in the silent stretch of morning, the comfort of knowing where you stand with someone.

A sound from down the hall - footsteps, a light tread, and then Dirk appears and the feeling dissipates. 

He joins them - or bristles at them, rather. Denies Farah’s offer of coffee, though that’s not unusual. But turns down tea or breakfast too, and only acknowledges Todd with a quick smile that feels put on, but better than being ignored outright. There’s no mention of the night before, or the days before, just a bright clap, the general air of _let’s get a move on, then!_  
☞

Farah drives, punching the address into the car’s GPS only to ignore it and take turns and shortcuts through Dirk’s passenger seat directions. 

There’s a ponderously small voice inside Todd’s head, offering up the suggestion that the house won’t be there anymore, that they had indeed missed their chance. But this voice is shaken off by Dirk’s shuffling through the car’s radio station, letting a few syllables of morning talk show, country anthems, dish soap jingles play before switching on to the next. 

Farah finally takes a hand off the wheel to smack at his fingers on the dial. Todd watches as Dirk jumps, looking affronted, then out through the window saying in a rather offhand tone, “ah, we’re here.” 

They park, and exit the car uneventfully, the black range rover looking every bit as out of place as they must, standing together outside the fence. 

They duck in through the fencing, and Todd is relieved at the pace - hurried, but with reason. Without that sky-darkening, manic feel that yesterday had held. 

The house itself regards them neutrally, looking much the same as it had the day before, though something feels just slightly misaligned about the whole thing. 

Todd’s trying to figure out what it is exactly that feels off as Dirk skirts up to the front windows and peers in, and Farah stalks off to one side. 

Brushing off the feeling and deciding that it must just be _him,_ lagging behind yet again, and he kicks himself into gear. Some begrudging feeling of normalcy returns once he’s fighting to keep up again. 

“Not much to look at,” Farah is saying, gravel crackling under her tread as she paced a line in front of the house. “Weird that they’d start in on a site without tearing down everything first.”

“What do you mean?” Todd asks, watching as she stoops down to trace a finger through the gravel. She looks up at him, holding the crouch and extending her hand.

“This is powdered stone. Whatever was here beside the house - this whole lot, actually - has been demolished. Either dug out or just excavated enough to get rid of the debris. But they left the house alone.” 

“Weird house, confirmed,” Dirk announces, wheeling around from the windows to face them and kicking up a twisting cloud of dust as he does so. “Shall we?” 

“Hang on one second,” Farah says, upright again and walking back to the fence, and the car waiting behind it. Dirk fidgets at the front of the house, just an antsy to get inside and set off exploring, though there’s something different about his stance, now draped in morning light and an extra observer. 

It’s the waiting, Todd figures, taking the chance that he may duck inside in the time it takes Farah to retrieve something from the car. He doesn’t, however. Just fidgets on the gravel, perfectly impatient, but that other undercurrent of reckless drive seems gone. The head-first, no partner needed attitude that weighs like leaden stress on Todd’s mind. 

“Here,” Farah says, approaching the house again. She produces a pair of police-style radios, offers them out. “Take these, keep them on, and radio in if anything comes up.” The edge of her nails catching the underside of Todd’s palm as she presses it to his hand. 

“We will,” he says, and she nods with finality. 

“I’ll see how much more I can dig up. Where did you meet up with that guy with the ID cards?” 

“That way,” Dirk points helpfully, though the gesture he makes is vague enough to really mean anything. If Farah minds, she doesn’t let on, just says “call you soon,” and with that she’s peeling off of the gravel, the nose of the car pointed back towards the city.

Dirk doesn’t go straight for the door, ducking around to one side of the house instead, his stance clearly reading _investigation._

A shadow crosses the sun then, and Todd looks up at the sky. The grey horizon of staggered buildings and vacant roadway standing out as particularly dismal. The wind isn’t quite so gusty anymore, but has picked up enough to be sending a scattering herd of clouds overhead. 

The sky, a mottled blue for now, as capricious as Dirk has been lately, now alit with gauzy streaks of morning light and the distinct scent of change rolling onto the ground beneath. 

Whether it’s in the air of caution, or the sign of a change of state, Todd can’t tell. Though he hopes it’s a sign that they’re getting away from that charging in headfirst kind of state - that was the one that worried him. 

He gets the feeling then, chasing the sounds of Dirk’s footsteps without realizing. A blurry, half-formed, abstract kind of feeling, and wonders partway into feeling it if that’s what it’s like. To receive an undecipherable message from the universe - or if it’s just the feeling of the morning sunlight. Something primal, pure and animal, brought on by the open air after living between walls of tension.

It’s a decided air of _something,_ and that’s as far as the reaches of Todd’s mind seem to allow him to go. _Happening,_ he supplies dimly in the absence of a translation. Nothing good or bad in particular that he can differentiate between. Just _happening._

Todd watches the sky for a moment longer before rounding the corner and also walking around the perimeter of the house. 

The windows of the house are stained and cloudy. The glass coated in an expected layer of dirt, dust from the gravel covering the construction site, kicked up by truck tires and solidified by rain. 

Todd approaches one, and bats at the dust with his shirt sleeve. It wipes away, leaving a smear against the glass, and he leans in close. From what he can make out of the interior, it’s a small room without much in it. Empty walls and what looks like a table and chairs beneath the window ledge. 

“No signs of anyone breaking in or damaging the place as far as I can tell,” Todd reports. The other sides of the house prove the same. There’s no graffiti or broken windows, not even any cigarette butts collecting nearby, or any recent footprints. 

“No signs of much of anything, really,” Dirk adds, and looks a strange mix of disappointed and radically excited. Still itching to _go_ , ready to run despite no posted signs or finish line. 

“We have to go inside,” Dirk says decisively. “After you.” They’ve both made a slow lap around the house, and stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the door - the only door of the small house. 

“I’m still not entirely comfortable with breaking in to places,” Todd says. The door is a heavy wooden one, painted with a thick coat of varnish that is also coated in a generous layer of greying dust. 

“Is it still considered breaking in if it’s condemned and technically open?” Dirk asks. Todd reckons he’s the only person who could pose it as a genuinely curious question. 

“Yes. Here goes nothing,” Todd says, and tries the doorknob. It turns without fuss, the easy opening surprising them both and spilling sunlight into the shadows of the house. 

It’s dark inside, and Todd blinks to adjust to it as Dirk skirts around him to move in through the door. Todd follows, letting his eyes get accustomed. The room they’ve entered looks like it takes up the majority of the floor, generally empty and quite plain. A little further ahead, Dirk makes an unappealing sound.

“What is it?” Todd asks, feeling something uneasy come to life in the pit of his stomach. He looks around the room they’ve entered. It’s unassuming as far as he can tell, with no decor or much furniture to speak of, just a few wooden chairs parked against a table at one side, and the piles of clothes the man had told them about. 

“I was hoping for something a bit more, oh, I don’t know,” Dirk says, turning to glance at him before beginning to look with more detail around the room. “Maybe all the missing people holding up a big banner that says ‘Thanks For Finding Us!’” Todd looks at him pointedly and he sighs. “I just thought it would be a nice change.” 

Todd is amending out loud that _yes, it would be nice,_ when the feeling in his stomach creeps back up on it. Uneasiness, that something inside, something’s-not-right swirl. He knows it well, and knows that it’s usually closely followed by a spiking hot knife of pain, images and dizziness shooting through his vision.

There’s a prolonged moment of panic swelling before it dissipates, though it leaves stubbornly. It flees from his mind in a strange mist. Todd pins it on his restless sleep, and banishes it with the concrete memory of swallowing his pills, chasing it with a swig of coffee before they had left the agency. That golden feeling in the kitchen doorway. 

He swallows again as he steps further into the house, a reassuring underline, the panicked feeling banished for now.

The room they’re in is starkly ordinary. Dusty, abandoned, but with no real sign of squatters despite the pile of clothes. These are folded very squarely in high stacks, seemingly colour coded, with some toppled over looking freshly rummaged through. 

“Do you think these belong to the missing people?” Dirk says aloud, toeing at the toppled pile and shooting another glance to Todd, who shrugs. 

Todd’s radio pings, and they both jump at the sound. It bounces almost violently against the empty walls. He answers, and Dirk shuffles closer to listen. Farah’s voice filters through the speaker. 

“I found a group that’s been camping out in the neighbourhood,” she says, her voice crackling through the device. “Someone says they had seen a few of the missing people in the area a few weeks ago. I don’t know how many of them will talk to me but I’m going to see if I can get any more names and information. I think this is a lot bigger than the list we already have.”

“Great,” Dirk says, a smooth blend of sarcasm and apprehension. 

“Find anything yet?” She asks, and Todd glances around the mostly empty room. 

“Nothing yet. We’ll call if we find anything - ” he hesitates, searching for the least morbid word that comes to find. “We’ll just call if we find anything.” 

“Okay. Stay safe,” she says, and clicks off. 

“Ever get the feeling that Farah does all the actual work and we just sort of - ” Todd trails off, pocketing the radio again.

“Flounder around making messes? Yes absolutely,” Dirk says readily. “Though there really isn’t much in here to make a mess _of_.” 

“Well there’s this, for a start.”

Todd’s picked up a trail of what looks like paint, an uneven line of it across the floorboards in wide spatters. It’s a bright yellow that has him thinking _attention, caution, yield signs,_ and it leads towards the door on the opposite side of the room, forming into one large patch on the floor. He moves towards it, stopping short of the doorway.

Todd gets the feeling that it’s beckoning them, a ‘come hither’ sort of gesture, and though the shape of the spatter looks intentional he can’t pick a solid form out of it. 

Dirk crosses the distance between them. The room, trying to compensate for it’s emptiness, amplifies the sound of his footsteps. 

“Is that...a bird?” Dirk asks, and as Todd twists his neck the shape on the ground becomes a bird in front of his eyes. A swallow, possibly, dipping low against the tiles. 

“Who do you think put it there?” Todd asks, taking another angled step, and looking at the mark full on. The edges of it are sharp but the placement innocent, as if it had simply dripped off from a trailing brush, winding into the house.

The room it’s leading into is dark. There’s barely any light to see by, and they switch on their flashlights with a soft _click_ to illuminate the path. Dirk seems eager to press on, and dips into the room, chasing the beam. Todd digs his heels in right as he crosses the doorway. 

“Where are the windows?” He asks, a wedge of suspicion too narrow to ignore present in his voice. It catches Dirk’s attention, and he casts his flashlight to the wall of the room. They’re completely empty, just dull expanses of chipping cream paint. A solitary wooden chair sits against a wall. 

“There were definitely windows on the outside of the house,” Dirk says, a curious confirmation, and he steps closer towards one of the walls. Todd watches as he starts tapping the lip of his flashlight against the surface. Dull, solid sounds ring out - unmistakably drywall. 

“That’s not the only odd thing,” Dirk says after tapping a line along the wall. 

“What?” Todd asks, and watches as Dirk points to the far corner of the otherwise empty room. On the floor is another yellow paint marking - a triangular beak recognizable from a distance this time, leading to another darkened doorframe. 

“This house is definitely bigger on the inside.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> user chopwood created a companion art piece for this story (thank you so much)
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/26789296


	6. The Corridor Inside The House That's Bigger On The Inside

“Physically, where are we right now?” Todd asks, saying it out loud more for the sake of his own thought process than to get a serious answer. Standing just through the doorway of the third room, that same uneasiness that the first room had brought on is back, crawling like an insect through Todd’s stomach. 

“If the outside of the house was, what, twenty paces? Less? Then this room shouldn’t even fit inside. So are we outside? Are we going down somehow?” 

Dirk lowers his flashlight to the floor and gives it a nudge. It rolls easily, picking up momentum as it crosses the room. The lit end casts a looping beam across the far wall, painting bright circles against the blank paint. 

“Are we underground right now?” Todd asks, but it’s more of a thought mused out loud than a question that expects answering. 

“How do you feel about going back outside and punching out a window or two?” Dirk asks, looking from the plain, uninteresting walls of the room that have gained significant interest in the past few moments.

“Marginally better than I did before,” Todd says, and they exchange a glance and a nod, before turning back the way they came. Todd reckons it’s as close to professional as they’re capable of getting. 

Todd tests out his steps as they walk, searching for a sign that they’re changing elevation, but there is none. Back in the second room from the front, the sole wooden chair looks at him curiously. He stops, frowns at it, tries to determine which side it had been on the first time. 

He turns to see Dirk with a matching expression, though focused on the opposite wall rather than the chair. Following his gaze, he finds a picture frame mounted on the wall. An expressionist style painting of a bear sat in the centre of the frame, looking back at them with a third similar look in its eyes. 

“Was that there before?” Dirk asks, puzzled and a little troubled sounding. 

“I don’t think so,” Todd replies. He nods to the chair as well, and is grateful when it doesn’t nod back. 

Back in the first room, the swirling, nervous nausea chokes back to life in Todd’s stomach. Something about the threshold of the room, that panicked internal clutch reminding him that he _has_ taken his pills, though that golden feeling from the kitchen feels impossibly far away now, like it had happened to someone else.

Todd’s suddenly eager to get back out into the sunshine, urging Dirk out the door with a hand on his back. The door opens as easily as it had let them in, and Todd’s grateful, stepping outside and blinking in the overpowering brightness cast down from the sky. 

The slowly gathering clouds have dispersed, leaving only a blank expanse of light. Blinking, adjusting, Todd squints upwards, finding the sun to be much lower in the sky than it had been when they were last outside. 

“What time is it?” Dirk asks immediately, wildly spinning on his heels, tracing the skyline with his eyes as Todd rubs his own, disoriented in daylight.

“Did we miss that? How did we miss that?” He asks, colours popping behind his eyelids.

The radio chirps again, and again, they both jump slightly. 

“Guys, what’s going on? Is everything okay?” Farah says through the device. She doesn’t sound quite frantic, but there’s a heightened edge of something in her voice. She sounds more like Dirk’s been sounding, Todd thinks. High strung and a little out of breath. 

“We’re fine, what’s up?” Todd radios back.

“Was your radio just off? I’ve been trying to call you over the past thirty minutes and the line’s been empty.”

“Thirty minutes, that’s impossible, you just called less than five minutes ago,” Todd says, suddenly feeling a little unhinged himself. That pooling swarm of panic strikes up the band inside his stomach again, and he fights it back to silence. 

“Something is very strange about this house,” Dirk says, to himself enough that the radio speaker doesn’t catch all of it.

“We should regroup,” Farah says into the radio. “I don’t like this.” 

“I don’t think time is working right,” Todd says, and Farah makes a sound on the other end. It’s a confirming sort of hiss, and it doesn’t come with any comfort.

“I’m going to head back over and pick you up,” Farah says, biting and decisive over the line. “It’ll take me maybe a half over.”  
“Or whatever that means,” Dirk says, looking back at the door of the house. It stands, inviting, almost inconspicuous. 

The radio bleeps off in Todd’s hands and he looks at it for a moment, then back up at Dirk. Pocketing the radio, he shrugs his jacket off his shoulders, bunching it around a fist and gesturing to one of the windows on the side of the house. 

“Here goes nothing,” Todd says, and Dirk braces as he swings, and the glass explodes in a dull shatter. Late afternoon sunlight floods into the room, illuminating a flurry of dust particles. 

“Right,” Todd says, looking at the glass shards. “Now what?”

“Now...we go back in and see if that did anything,” Dirk says. He sounds assured, and Todd shakes his jacket out. “That’s at the corner - ” he continues, nodding at the broken window and walking back to the front of the house. “So we’ll be able to see what the outside edge corresponds with inside.” 

The front door lets them in as easily as the first time. Stepping into the house triggers that same pre-attack feeling in Todd’s stomach, but he’s bracing for it this time, and it fades off. The sunlight coming through the first unbroken window looks daisy-bright and crisp, and Todd blinks at it in confusion, looking back out the door where the sun is beaming in rich and orange hued. 

“With all the strange little minute aspects of this place, I’m struggling to see what pieces go with our investigation,” Dirk says as they cross back inside the house. “Who left this paint trail? Was it there when Cece Silberman found the house? Is the horse important?”

“Horse? What horse?” Todd asks, redirecting his confusion to look at Dirk.

“The horse from the painting,” Dirk says, then frowns when Todd looks just as confused. “The painting that wasn’t there before,” he explains, a little exasperated. 

“The _bear?”_ Todd asks, blinking. 

_“Bear?”_ Dirk parrots back. 

“Yeah, it was - hang on,” Todd says, crossing into the next room. 

“Ah!” Dirk explains, coming up to the painting, still mounted on the same wall. “How curious!”

“How did you think that was a horse?” Todd asks, staring into the frame. The rotund bear stared back.

“Wh - ” Dirk sputtered, looking from the frame to Todd and back again. “There _was_ a horse, it’s gone now.” 

_“Gone,”_ Todd says. “What do you mean?”

“I mean the painting is bloody empty, Todd,” Dirk says, almost laughing, and then cutting it off in an instant. “You’re not looking at an empty frame right now, are you?”

“It’s still a bear,” Todd says, though the painting staring him down looks less sure of himself. Like a ripple on a stretch of hot pavement, as if the paint was still wet, the image half-formed. Blinking again, he rubbed at his eyes. 

“Do you think there’s going to be a large and possibly murder-y animal in one of these rooms, now?” Dirk asks, guarding his posture and looking at Todd conspiringly. 

“What?” Todd asks.

“Or! The missing people are somehow connected to paintings. Like re-entering a room triggers a gallery of sorts, and they appear and disappear - or turn into animals!” 

“I have no idea,” Todd says back, and points to the back corner of the room. “But that’s where the window should be.” Dirk follows his finger with his flashlight beam. There’s no window at all, let alone broken pieces on the floor. Just a dripping line of yellow paint accumulating in a small bird-shape, pointing into the third room. 

Entering the third room for the second time, it’s just as quiet and uniform. The same winding trail of spattered yellow paint. Another yellow bird against the floor. This bird is in the far righthand corner of the room, in front of the black rectangular promise of another room. 

Todd wants to suggest that they turn back now, wait for Farah in the sunlight, however low in the sky it may now be. But the bird, the doorframe, the shadowed outline of Dirk’s back in front of him all edge him forwards.

They enter the fourth room. 

Dirk stops in his tracks. Looking at the four barren walls, the door they entered through, to Todd, and back into the room. 

“Do you feel that?” He asks, and Todd freezes, bracing for impact, but nothing comes. 

“Feel what?” He asks carefully, coming to stand beside Dirk and looking around the room. It’s as empty as the one they had entered from. No windows, no paintings. Just the nervous scatter of their flashlight beams against pallid walls. 

“It’s like...” Dirk shivers, stops himself. “I understand why that man told us that no one likes to stay in this place for very long.”

“Though ‘very long’ is pretty subjective if time doesn’t work right on the inside,” Todd offers. 

“I can’t understand why someone would carry on, though,” Dirk adds. His feet betray his words, and he inches through the room, casting his beam along in spiralling patterns, settling on the spilled paint bird flying into the fifth room. 

“You mean if they weren’t also looking for someone?” Todd asks, creeping in behind him, and Dirk looks over his shoulder to nod. 

“I don’t think there’s anyone left in this house,” Dirk says, tentatively pronouncing the last word like he’s not sure it fits once they’re both inside the next room. Empty save for a scattering of dead leaves and other plant debris. Dirk stoops down, reaching for a scrap of something. He comes up with a battered feather, examines it, and looks at Todd with an unreadable expression. The item is dirty, and he lets it flutter back onto the floorboards, wiping his fingers on his legs as he walks in further. 

“What makes you say that?” Todd asks, though it feels futile. There’s a descending blanket of despair the further they walk from the door. 

“I don’t think Jolie Siberman hired us to bring her sister home,” Dirk says, shining his light into the next doorframe. He’s frowning, not moving forward, and Todd takes the moment to shine his own beam onto the floorboards. The paint trail is thicker here, the bird on the ground larger, wings extended to breach the length of the whole doorframe. 

“I don’t think this is a rescue mission, Todd,” Dirk says. There’s a gap of silence that tugs at Todd like hunger would, sharp and biting, empty and cross for it. 

“‘What _happened_ to my sister?’” Dirk recites, still staring at the line his light is making into the next room. From where he’s standing, off to the side and just behind, Todd can’t make out anything past the doorframe. 

“Not ‘where is she’ or ‘find her,’ just ‘what _happened_. Almost like she knew something we didn’t... And that man, too. Didn’t you notice? _‘They weren’t the sort of people that anyone would miss,’_ that’s what he said. Past tense. _Past_ tense. All of it. They didn’t all get locked up somewhere, or join a circus or change their names. Cece Silberman is dead. They’re all dead. Everyone who’s gone into this place is dead.” There’s a shimmer to Dirk’s eyes when he stops talking, a tremble to his jaw that he grits and squares out. The look in his eyes is bright, wet and bright and unlike the sharp glint that had sat like a bonfire, blazing through his high wired days before.

It’s pale, a bright wet crystal light, high beams cast out on an empty highway. It catches cruelly in Todd’s own eyes, and he blinks, casting it away.

“We’re obviously not dead,” Todd says, careful to balance out the weight of each word, refusing to give in to the thick ropes of panic lining up to dance with his vocal cords. “And what about the ones that the man mentioned? They got out.” 

“Oh, you mean the ones that all went crazy?” Dirk says with a horribly small laugh, eyes still not moving, but now not seeing either. There’s a vacant glaze to them now, still locked into the next room, and suddenly, terribly, Todd doesn’t want to look, doesn’t want to see what’s pushed Dirk onto such a dark and despairing train of thought. 

His hand betrays him, gently shifting his own flashlight from the floor to the doorway. The light goes where it’s pointed, catching hold of the shape of something just past the frame, and dances along its angles.

☞

The fifth room didn’t open up directly like the other four had. Instead, there was a small gapped section - an entranceway - to be stepped into first. 

Todd’s relief at not seeing something downright awful is quickly swept away by Dirk’s unwillingness to enter it. His body seems itching to move forward, to dive deep and divulge the secrets of the house, much like he always did. But his eyes, his hands, held a tremble that Todd could only guess came from either his head or his heart - whichever non-universal driving force that had propelled them thus far. The hesitance grew in the waver of the beam. 

“Do you want to go further?” Todd asks. The words out loud seem to snap Dirk out of the hazy state he’d entered, and he stiffens somewhat, shaking himself out.

“Right. Of course. Pressing ever onwards,” Dirk says, though the first cautious step he takes is timid, lacking in some usual air of confidence. Or lacking the bluff that it normally disguises itself with.

“We can just go back and wait for Farah,” Todd presses, wondering internally who he’s trying to convince. Some inane and nervous part of his mind starting to rattle, saying _maybe she’s already waiting for us._

Dirk takes another child sized step forward, and this time Todd follows him. 

Inside the gap, flashlights crawling out in front of them, sending them foot by foot further away from the front door. Todd gets the idea that they’re descending inside some monster, opening wide to ingest them whole. 

Though it’s not the belly of the beast, but the esophagus of it, still able to twist upwards and taste daylight.

Stepping forward at this new and grim pace, Todd’s imagination kicks up inside his head. It begins whispering all the possibilities, living and breeding around the corner of the room. He’s hearing Jolie Silberman, words she’s never said.

 _They’ve ruled her out. They wouldn’t give her a chance._

And then they round the corner, and the whisperings lose momentum, replaced with more questions, more shadowed murmurings. 

The room is larger than the previous ones had been, and filled with all the things a normal house would harbour. There’s furniture - but angled in unnatural ways. Couches standing on their ends, lining the walls with mattresses and tables - all propped up lengthwise. Several layers of these, lining both walls like shark’s teeth. Chairs stacked together, scraping against the ceiling. Rolled up tubes of carpets, curtains - rods inserted - lining up amid the gaps. 

It’s not a room at all, Todd realizes as they round that first sharp corner of the entranceway. It’s a hallway, impossibly cluttered with more things. All shoved in and packed tightly, and the beam from their flashlights struggle to find the end of the hall. Angled shapes jump up from the light and distort the objects into more intimidating shapes. There’s a gap between both sides - a single filed and cramped little path - and it stares them down without emotion. 

Dirk has faltered to a stop to match Todd, and for a moment they just stand uncomfortably in the tight entrance to the narrow stretch of hall. 

“Ah,” Dirk says, and Todd thinks he can hear the last of Dirk’s excitement dripping out of his voice, landing wetly on the floor below, mixing with the yellow paint, leading onwards. 

“Pressing on, then,” Dirk says again, and moves incrementally further in. 

They practically have to wedge themselves down the path, both of Todd’s scraping bits of wooden furniture as they go. The paint trail on the floor is sparser, more smeared along the floor,  
and Dirk wonders out loud who’s been leaving it. Todd has no answer, just keeps placing his steps in the spaces Dirk’s leave behind.  
The paint trail is infrequent here, less on the floor, some streaking across the edges instead. Scraping through the carved out tunnel of lamps and folded futons, Todd can imagine the artist’s brush wedged against the closing walls as they move through the house, folding their arms inwards to navigate the hallway. 

He reaches out to touch a line of it where it looks so thick it could be fresh and wet, and in doing so small chips of paint come away with his hand, caught beneath his nails and sticking to his palm. 

“What if this is where all the missing people are,” Dirk is saying, and Todd looks away from the colour. He’s hit with a horrible image then, as vivid in his mind as one of his episodes is in his eyes, his nerves. An image of so many missing people, unidentifiable in so many pieces, bodies rolled into carpets, chopped up to fit in antique wooden drawers. He shakes the mental sight away, tunes back in to Dirk, the hall, the present and viewable moment. 

“What if they’ve all come this far and then got stuck in this corridor and slowly turned into pieces of outdated furniture,” Dirk chirps. The bounce and lilt of his voice too off, too vibrant to be anything but frightened, and Todd hates it. Most of all Todd hates how after everything they’ve seen, together and separate, he can’t brush it off as being impossible. He angles himself differently, shines his light over Dirk’s shoulder to try and see the route they’re headed. 

The sight of the door at the end of the corridor isn’t quite enough to fill him with relief. From his position, and the unsteady double patches of light from their beams, he’s unable to tell whether it’s cartoonishly small, or so far away that they haven’t even crossed half the distance yet. Neither instil anything but that same nauseous form of creeping dread in the pit of his stomach. 

They carry on like that for a while longer - cramped, taking cautious steps - with Todd pulling back to a stop when he hears Dirk groan.

“Ugh, what is this?” Dirk complains, pulling his arm back from where it was bracing along the side of his route. His hand comes away streaked with congealing paint, small black pieces of something clumped in along the wet bits, sticking to his hand and smearing up his sleeve. Todd fumbles, drawing up on his tiptoes to aim his light to Dirk’s hand too. 

Small dark feathers pepper the side and palm, glued to the partially dried paint like it was adhering them to his skin. 

“Seems strange and unlikely that there’d be a bird in here, don’t you think?” Dirk asks, wrinkling his nose in distaste and trying to neatly smear the paint off on the closest object - a large cedar wardrobe, doors facing away from the path. 

Todd doesn’t particularly want to imagine a living creature wandering in the the curious maze of rooms, maybe crawling into a gap and being pinned beneath the clutter. Though there’s no scent to suggest anything had gotten trapped and died, Todd doesn’t write the idea off as impossible. Instead, he casts his beam and gaze to the spaces between the furniture lining the hall.

There are smaller shapes casting smaller, more intricate shadows in the piles. These smaller things catch Todd’s eyes, bending his elbow cruelly to aim his flashlight in between the cracks of furniture. He can’t quite make them out - more plant debris, dirt and stones, maybe, though Todd can’t fathom a reason for them to be there - for any of this to be there, themselves included. He’s about to crouch in further, twisting for a closer look, when he stumbled in the narrow space, knocking a shoulder roughly into the large object on his left. It’s a bookshelf, a two seater balanced along it’s top, and as his body rocks against the shelf’s edge the whole thing wobbles awfully, making a low wooden groan that bounces off the shadowed shapes around them.

He freezes, and ahead of him feels Dirk do the same - some instinctual, electrical pulse that extends between them in the air - some old, animal urge to hold still, become smaller, lie hidden and the danger will pass.

There’s a moment where neither of them breathe and Todd is certain that this danger _won’t_ pass, that the inhuman creak and groaning will amplify and send the furniture crashing down, trapping them in the rubble of armchairs and side dressers. A fleeting, ancient and small piece of Todd’s brain is shrieking at the thought, flashing _I don’t want to die in this house!_ and then a deeper, even more sinister thought takes over - 

_how many others have thought that too?_

The furniture doesn’t come down upon them. It merely shifts slightly, creaking the way old houses do, with a final groan and a sway and then stillness again. 

Todd points himself forwards again, catching Dirk’s eye which harbours an expression that suggests he was imagining a twin fate. 

Real relief comes on then, a scant amount, but he sighs it out nonetheless. The doorway up ahead is closer, human-sized, the floor leading up to it littered with more paint, marking the way out with a bright and narrow colour.

The smell of it is present now too, narrating their transition from the thin passageway into the next room. The bite of the scent in the air, bitter and catching in the backs of their throats has Todd thinking again of being inside some monster, leaving the neck of it, passing through the bile ducts. 

That spoonful of relief is palpable in the sag of Dirk’s shoulders. His stress is viewable from behind, and Todd can imagine the knots he’s growing underneath.  
But the relief doesn’t stay. Instead, something glimmers up ahead, another splotchy, painted bird on the floor again, but also something unfamiliar - even more so than the rooms and pieces they’ve passed.

Dirk seems to feel it too, though he doesn’t say anything, just drops back so that they’re shoulder to shoulder, and then falling a step behind as Todd chases that unfamiliar _something_ leading them away from the hall. 

The paint smell getting stronger now, like the artist is just out of sight, leaving a fresh trail just up ahead. Todd brushes off a threatening stroke of headache that invades his temples with the chemical scent. That _other,_ that _something else_ feeling is encroaching on his vision now too, and the not-knowing is what pulls him forward. 

His motion is narrated by the feel of Dirk pressed against his back, his breath a damp presence at the nape of his neck, what should be uncomfortably close, but more welcome in the oddity of the new room. 

It’s barely a room at all, just a small cove that isn’t the hallway. The area seems to Todd to serve as a palette cleanse, a pocket-sized nook to rid his head of shapes and angles and fill it with the captivating feeling that _something’s off._ It’s his pararibulitis trigger in jewel tones, an altered state, intoxicatingly coloured. 

Todd can hear it now, too. That new, something different shine just ahead, pulling the energy of their lights into the next room. 

There’s a quiet hiss - and he notes for the first time that there’s been no sound to the house. No hum of electricity or water pipes, no creaks or sighs of support beams.

But there is a sound now. It pulls them from the cove into the next room, and there the something different reveals itself to them, bared and bright inside the though.

Light. Bulbs, affixed to the ceiling in thick lines of exposed wiring. So bright that Dirk lifts an arm to his eyes, shielding them as he clicks off his flashlight. An almost neon-yellow tone, burning so bright that shadows cease to exist in this new room. Also ceasing to exist is everything save from the colour yellow, the itch behind Todd’s retina’s, the black spots caught on his eyelids with every blink.

And the sound lives amid the bulbs. Paint, more yellow paint, spattered as high as it’s been. Yellow paint, humming now as it pulls them through. Sizzling of the paint on the exposed lightbulbs. Tinting the colour of the room.

Blinding, the fumes and burning glare eclipsing, blocking any thought from Todd’s head that isn’t that colour, that intensity.  
Yellow light, yellow paint, yellow room. 

The mark on the floor, the motion to follow into the next room.

And impossibly _more_ yellow, is the gruesome dollop of paint on the floor in front of the next door - a twisted bird, beak wet and pointing, gloppingly into the following room. And that room seems to hold it’s own colour, the only thing separated from the bright, the light, the aggression of the yellow surrounding them. 

The doorway of this next room lies partially hidden within Todd’s eyes, shrouded in the negative black blur he projects onto it with every blink, every attempt to escape the glaring bulbs overhead. 

The time it takes to adjust - to attempt to adjust - to the glare is unmeasurable, and amid those unmeasurable moments it suddenly makes sense to Todd, why the laws of time weren’t working through the rooms. Whatever thought it was though, it lost amid the hissing, burning fumes overhead, and the light in between the room is now glowing, burning a deep orange colour.

“I really think we should be heading back,” Dirk says in a hollow voice that turns Todd around in his tracks. 

His face is illuminated terribly in front of Todd, over exposed and painting his flesh in a sick and frightening way. Todd opens his mouth to agree, the thought of sinking back into that dark and narrow hallway impossibly _disgustingly_ comforting now, when he sees Dirk stumble forwards instead.

Todd’s eyebrows furrow - squinting against the stomach-churning brightness, but also at Dirk’s actions. He’s still moving forwards, though the look in his eyes is as hollow and tortured as his voice had been. 

“Really should be heading back,” he repeats, still taking uneasy steps towards that doorway, a pulsing orange flame beneath the lights. It’s like there’s something tethered around his midsection, luring him deeper into the rooms. 

“We should,” Todd says, trying for firm and watching his words cook in the air before him. He extends a hand, catches the back of Dirk’s arm, willing him to stop, to not enter that next room. To do so would be a _bad idea,_ he’s certain of this. As certain as he’s ever been, as certain as the times he’s known that the flare of pain he feels in his fingertips will turn to flames if he merely looks down at it.

But something always seems to compel him to look.

 _Compels_ him. This is the thought that snaps Todd out of the spell the light the paint the room is casting. 

What was compelling Dirk, here, now, in this moment? Was this the case? The universe? Or something else, something worse, something inside the house, something that _was_ the house, maybe, and he tightens his grip on Dirk’s arm, tightens the firmness in his tongue. 

“Dirk, are you - ” he’s not sure what word to fit in. His fingers, his tongue inside his mouth, feel unsteady. Like even the most well-chosen, gingerly placed concern is about to backfire  
a fuse lit by the light, naked and grinning and ready to send shrapnel outward through the room. 

“I’m - Fine.” Dirk says. Todd can feel his own face twisting in reaction to the way he says it. Eyes wide, locked onto the general location of Todd, but so far from looking at him. Smile wide - grotesquely so, his expression straining, an undercurrent of trembling, holding it all together. It’s a melting polystyrene mask of what a human smile should be.

Todd’s firmness eludes him in that moment, leaving him at a loss of what to say. He knows what he wants to do - grab Dirk by the shoulders, shake him, maybe just one good shove would do, loosen the disarray in his mind and shock him back to normal. But that doesn’t feel like a real option, and he casts the urge away. 

It comes crawling back to him anyway.

It’s the worst thing he’s seen, Todd thinks. Maybe. That far away, caught up in the never-ending chase inside Dirk’s eyes. 

Driven not by desire or curiosity, but by a compulsion larger than either of them, and the drive of it, that stubborn, lash of energy that leaked out of Dirk on those slow headache days before.

Todd suddenly gets the image of stopping, digging his heels into the floorboards which would certainly give way, digging trenches with his soles, glueing him into the floor, turning wooden and stationary. And watching dirk disappear into the next room, and the next one after that. Disappearing like the pages of others, the neat and matter of fact bullet list on Farah’s computer and _god, Farah._

“We should go back,” Todd says. “We should go back now, Farah’s waiting.” 

“We should,” Dirk agrees immediately, an pressing back in close to Todd, and _there_ is real relief, solid enough to touch, firm enough to form a weapon with, and beat that distant, yellow-lit look from Dirk’s eyes. 

But it’s not enough to stop the edging steps they both take, in sync, shrinking away from the disorienting hiss and burn and yellow glare above.

The next room comes around the corner to greet them, and it’s all red. 

Todd can feel Dirk flanking him, pressing in as tightly as he can without touching. Todd can see them, as if from above, approach the doorframe - too narrow for them both. Todd angles his shoulders, sees himself angling them, turning them flat and sideways in a strangely unconscious, dreamlike motion. Squeezing them both in through the doorframe and casting away the urge to reach out and squeeze something more tactile. The edge of Dirk’s jacket, or the hem of his sleeve. His forearm, his hand. Anything to keep grounded as the soles of his shoes scuff over the yellow paint on the floorboards. It doesn’t streak, though he feels it’s fresh enough to stain. 

The red room looks the same as the one before it, just a bit larger. Ceiling low and flat, bare floor, empty walls. There’s nothing at all in this one - no scraps or bits of furniture - not even a door on the opposite wall. It feels like an empty stage, waiting for something. 

Todd wonders if it’s been waiting for him, and follows up this thought with wondering how he can stop feeling that way. He can feel the marching band beat in his chest again, that dread, that pre-attack warning in his stomach, his heart picking up speed. 

The catch of a bass drum in his ribcage, and Todd is aware of a coldness to his right side. An empty prickling feeling against the expanse of the unfamiliar room. It’s an unmistakable and hollow feeling that tells him Dirk is no longer next to him. He doesn’t have to turn and look, but he does, and the empty wall beside him seems to grin back, just as hollow.


	7. Inside the House Inside the Room That's All Red

“Dirk?” Todd calls, and feels the sound of his own voice reverberating in his head. There’s no answer, only the blank stare of the empty walls in front of him. 

Todd takes two irregular steps backwards, spinning back around to face the way they’d come. An empty expanse stares back at him, with no sign that Dirk had been there at all. 

_“Dirk!”_ He shouts, loud enough to sound more like a bark than a name. Wheeling back around - his vision all red again - he’s met with more silence. But this time the room isn’t empty. 

A solitary refrigerator stands against the centre wall now. He stares at it incredulously, though not disbelievingly, and the object stares back. It’s littered with papers and small magnets, the surface and the items all tinted a dark red. Looking up at the ceiling, along the walls, there’s no immediate sign of what’s causing the red light. Thinking that there doesn’t really _have_ to be an explanation at this point, Todd moves forward. His legs carry him stiffly across the room, heart picking up an uncomfortably fast pace between his ribs. 

There’s a queasy pulse beneath his skin now, a white-eyed and white knuckled kind of voice in his head, speaking at a rabbit’s pace. Gnashing its teeth and spitting out _what ifs_ that cloud any other structured thought he tried to have.

_What’s inside? What if Dirk’s inside? What if that’s the door to the next room?_

The image that comes into his head is just as queasy, just as gnashing. Dirk, inside the thing. Inexplicably wrapped up in plastic layers in his mind, breath fogging up in front of his mouth, body cramped and folded up. That bright banner cheerfully stating _Thanks for Finding Us!_

It’s a sick and vivid image, conjured up by the adrenaline and stress the house has been feeding into him, not real and not fair. The preemptive sort of dark and intrusive thing that start nagging at the recesses of his mind, tiny flares, the harbingers of his worse episodes. 

_Get a grip!_ He scolds himself internally, flexing the muscles in his arms, clenching his fists, and he breaks through the chain of thoughts, wild and cruel by lunging forwards, pulling open the door. 

A bleakly stocked fridge blinks to life at him. The light inside on, though he’s suddenly numbly sure that the thing isn’t plugged in to anything. Pale yellow light - artificial and blending with the red light - turns a stomach churning colour, spilling out over his shoes like regurgitated food. 

There’s no food in the fridge. Just a handful of condiments, caps sticky and leaking out against each other, a six pack of beer that had been picked away at, plastic rings still connecting the ones that remained. 

It’s not the sight of a body, Dirk or otherwise, nor a portal to some more disconcerting room, but the image burns itself into Todd’s eyes all the same, and hits him like a punch to the stomach. The shock is punctuated by the sound of him slamming the door shut.

It’s too specifically familiar, down to the brand of the cheap beer, the congealing puddle of barbecue sauce on the bottom shelf. 

It’s the same fridge and contents that had sat in his first apartment. The same ketchup mustard relish combo pack he had swiped from his college roommate before bailing, dropping out, laying down the deposit for the shithole he had lived in with his parent’s money. 

Slamming the door does nothing to settle the nerves now firing warning flares behind his eyes, red to match the room, the blood now pounding sickly in his head. 

The front of the fridge is coated in multiple layers of photographs, postcards, grocery lists, children’s drawings. All grotesquely familiar in such a muted, understated way, that the backwards step Todd means to take turns into an outstretched hand, peeling a postcard from beneath a magnet - sending in skittering to the floor. 

He holds it up to his face, trying to draw air in from the room, trying to remember how to breathe, wondering if the air going into his lungs in scraps and fits is red too. 

His parents smile cheerily up at him from the cardstock. Amanda plastered in between them, their shoulders flattening together, three smiles beaming up at him, as bright as the neon bubble text beneath the photo.

_HAPPY FAMILY!_

The black inked scrawl beneath it, a personal touch of script, this reading - beaming - up at him _We don’t wish you were here!_

Blinking as if he’s fighting back tears - though there’s nothing behind his eyes but red light and a growing sense of dread, the contents of his stomach, his veins pulsing a horrid cocktail - he means to drop the souvenir to the floor. Instead he pockets it, hands following through on the motion on their own accord. 

This is autopilot, he thinks numbly. Shock, maybe. Too much sensory input, too much taking hold and not letting up. It feels like the slowed down, out of focus moments before an attack assaults him, but there’s that memory again - this morning, a lifetime ago, chasing his pills with hot coffee. 

A ripple runs through him then, a shiver of a voice from ages ago.

_Have you noticed an acceleration of strangeness in your life?_ He almost laughs at the cloying memory, implanting itself front and centre in his mind. The voice sounds curiously pleased. 

_Well_ Todd? _Have_ you? 

The laugh trying to bubble out on a wave of that red tinged exhale slips and vanishes before it leaves his throat. 

_Dirk. Where is Dirk._

Spinning away from the fridge - he can’t face the multiple of _layers_ coating the front of it - enough to get lost in, maybe. Enough to lose his mind in, surely. 

In the turning motion he kicks the magnet and it rattles. _Rattles,_ and looking down, chasing the sound, he sees the floor is coated in small things. A mess of nails and gears and ends of metal cords, strewn across the whole room. 

Bending down, he touches his hand to a pile of screws, moving in slow motion. They rock at the contact, clicking together like teeth. They seem to trail away from him, a winding, uneven line, and blindly, he follows them.

The screws turn into studs, having fallen off a wristband that’s been scattered onto the floor, breaking on the impact that Todd hadn’t heard happen. He looks at the broken thing, nudges it with his foot. Perforated black leather, the kind like Amanda would wear, and in a nauseous whirl he’s thinking of her, wondering where she is, what trajectory she’s on.

When he takes another faltering step forwards - or is it backwards? - the blank walls refuse to give him a coordinate that makes sense. They seem to be breathing alongside him, and bulge outwards with the effort. 

Then Amanda is there. 

And Todd flinches - a full body jolt that pulls his skin, tight and sweating against his skeleton. 

Amanda, one outstretched arm against the floor like it’s beckoning to him. Her fingers are also scattered - outwards, unless it’s sideways or front ways. His eyes crawl up to her face, feeling like they haven’t blinked in years, haven’t seen a colour that wasn’t red in so much longer. Red like his pills. Like the blood pounding in his ears. 

“Ah - ?” Her name shrivels on his tongue as he meets her eyes. 

They’re void of anything familiar. No light, not living. A red blur leaking from what should be the whites of her eyes into the irises - black as death. It’s a perfect match for the rest of her. 

Deep gouges run the length of her body, and a dark stain of blood lines the side she’s collapsed onto like a wet shadow. 

Segmented shapes protrude from her abdomen onto the floor - metal clinging to the blood and spongey pieces slipping out. As he looks, knees locked and fists balled like stones at his side, the mess glistens, ripples. Dark purples and stringing lines of white that somehow hold on to their lack of colour beneath the glaring red glow. 

And her eyes, bulging open, red glazed, mouth gaping open in a black hole that insists she died screaming. 

Then finally he blinks. stomach twisting in a wrenching knot, sending a hot bitter line up into the back of his throat. 

Blinks and the yellowness is back - in his mouth, locked inside his eyes. He can feel his mind wrestling, jerking out of his head to escape the moment, and in the moment that it almost succeeds he thinks briefly of the golden morning.

There’s a pull to that thought, a rational urge of something that isn’t a part of the room but then it blinks out - smashes like a bulb. And once it’s gone it accentuates the feeling that he is under the earth. And might be tunnelling deeper with every shuddering breath of red lit air, filling him up, weighting him down. 

Another blink - it feels like someone else controlling the movements in his face. Involuntary twitches, spasms as he refuses to drink in what he’s seeing. 

He falls onto his knees next. Reaches out for the hand pointing outwards from his sister’s corpse. Grabbing hold of it, he finds it’s not cold or stiff like he was terrified it would be. The heavy feeling of the arm - clammy, engorged - is somehow worse. He drops it back in an instant, blood crawling into the lines in his fingers. The sound it makes as it reconnects with the ground sends a gristling shiver through the back of his neck. A meaty _thud._ A metallic rattling of screws and magnets on the floor. It starts playing on a loop inside his head. 

Heaving back onto his feet, the soles of his shoes skid in the greasiness of the blood - extending towards him much like her arm had, like the message on the card. 

Either the room spins or his head does, and he staggers back - connects with one of the impassive walls. Heat radiates into him from the plaster, startling and he shoves off of it, slipping on the streaked floor, landing hard back on his knees. Splaying out a hand to steady himself - though the notion of something steady doesn’t stay for long. 

He doesn’t connect with the floor at all, but something damp and yielding. 

He looks down. The unseeing eye sockets of Farah Black stare up at him. Inquisitive in their deepness, black and jagged holes, pressing an imploring question into Todd. 

_“Why am I cut in half, Todd?”_

He doesn’t have an answer for her. 

What he does have is a feeling like his eyes can’t settle on any one image in front of him, spinning like skipping records inside his head. 

But they do settle - deep into Farah’s midsection bared to face him. Where severed nerves are split like hairs, arteries still dripping. They quiver and writhe like insects, searching for their other half. And several feet further, it searches back. An impatient twitch latched onto her left leg, foot tapping in annoyance against the floor. Sending pieces of metal ricocheting this way and that, leaving wet trails of gore as they go. 

_I_ told _you everyone in this house was dead,_ Dirk’s voice crows inside his head, gleeful to be right. Todd can practically see him in front of him, wildly grinning face blocking out the bodies on the floor. 

And suddenly he is in front of him, though he’s not smiling, he’s shouting. And at first the words don’t reach Todd - his ears ringing, throbbing out the pulse that’s radiating through his entire body. It filters through like a garbled too-distant radio, thick with static, fading in and out.

_“Todd, come on, get up, we have to go, we have to go NOW!”_ Then pressure on Todd’s shoulders, cold and desperate hands digging into the fabric of his jacket, and he gets dragged to his feet. 

_“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry Todd, I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t save any of them,”_ Dirk is babbling, voice cracking as it peaks and dips, distorted from the red light. _“We have to go or we’ll end up the same way, come ON.”_

“We can’t leave them here!” Todd screams back, the words ripping out of his throat and sending a searing bolt of pain that feels like it’s tearing him open from sternum to chin. 

_“There’s no other way,”_ Dirk says, and his eyes are stretching open so wide, soaking up all the red light. And now he _is_ pulling open the fridge door, crawling inside - and the back of the fridge has opened up into the lecherous mouth of a tunnel.

“That’s - that’s not - we can’t just - ” Todd is stuck to the floor. He can feel blood - not hot but not cool either - soaking into the cracked soles of his shoes, spreading into his socks and his skin. 

Dirk makes a horrible strangled sound - desperate, frustrated and gutteral - and climbs back out. 

_“Todd, please,”_ he comes towards Todd, shoes a sliming shuffle against the floor, shining brightly. _“If we don’t go NOW - ”_ he stretches out an arm, hand pleading, almost reaching Todd.

Something comes down from the ceiling, strikes the top of Dirk’s head, and silences him instantly. He stares forward, Todd caught in the projection of his gaze, waiting for the next word. It doesn’t come, and they stand in a frozen moment of impossibly red quiet. Todd hadn’t noticed extending his own arm to connect with Dirk’s, and for two four eight heartbeats both of their hands stay locked inches apart.

Dirk’s next word doesn’t come. Instead, the right half of his face peels away from the left, and the two split halves of his body fall in a mirrored _thump_ onto the floor. The spatter floods the bottom of Todd’s jeans - this time it’s hot as it soaks into the fabric. 

Todd doesn’t look at the body. Can’t control the ligaments in his neck to point his head down, even if he had wanted too. Though he doesn’t want to - can’t think of anything he wants _less_ , can’t think at all. He’s unsure of what he wants, if he’s capable of wanting anything that isn’t removal from this place, from this present, this carved out hell. 

Blank eyes that refuse to close, or redirect, pointed like a gun into the tunnel inside the fridge.   
the walls look wet, lined with something sharp. He knows what _it_ wants - he can see it in the way the snaking tube has carved itself to fit his frame. He can see it, dark and waiting, can see it the way he could see the red light, darkening at the corners, the way he could see their bodies if he could move his head, if he _wanted_ too - 

But what he wants is to claw the eyes out of his head. Just claw them out and undo seeing any of the things surrounding him like a pack of wolves inside the room. 

And as he thinks that destructive and detaching thought, something happens to his vision. It doesn’t black out, but something seems to stand in front of his eyes. Like a curtain dropping, shielding him from the sights inside the room. It’s blurring, wiping clean, almost hot in how bright it is.

For a moment Todd think it’s death. The radio, television screen, blurring into static. Bright and out of focus. Death riding in on its white horse, eclipsing the room until there’s only white, burning white.

But then that white turns sour, yellow, and details sharp and pointed advance back into his vision. 

Fluorescent lights - the source of the blinding yellow glow - though these ones are without paint spatters. Radiating from the ceiling in long strips, each piece of tubing lit up, ghastly bright, whitish against Todd’s eyes. 

The shock at such intrusive brightness takes over the other army of shock. Impossible and white, clean, _technical_ and it seeps like bleach into his brain, eliminating the rest of it, scrubbing deep and distracting. 

He looks up at the lights - doesn’t notice that he’s regained some kind of control over his body, because his mind is lost in the lights. Bright, narrow, pounding down light that reaches out and lays across the blood, the bodies he won’t recognize, can’t look at, can’t think about. 

The lights are moving, dancing above him. A thought runs in, slipping through the thin cracks left inside his mind - fractured like old pavement. It’s not of Dirk or Farah or Amanda, or the inside parts of their bodies clinging to the patterns of the soles of his shoes. It’s of teeth in the darkness. The sharp edges glinting at him from the tunnel. Of deep water. Angler fish. 

But the thought doesn’t last. Dismissed, banished by the moving lights. 

They’re swaying just slightly at first, and then swinging, dancing against the connecting chain that’s affixing it to the ceiling. 

It’s wrong. _Wrong_ in the same way the whole house has been wrong. Wrong as the broken window that wasn’t broken on the inside. Wrong as the changed lighting in the sky when they stepped outside - and that catches in Todd’s mind. The position of the sun, that pulls at him, that’s supposed to mean something, remind him of something. Supposed to spur him to _do_ something. 

But doing means moving, means seeing, looking. 

He does move, tilts on his feet, and his eyes sweep the room in a swirl. The red is still there beneath the ceiling. The glow gone but the blood there, unmoving shapes on the floor, and he stops moving. Refuses to see, to look again. 

Looks somewhere else. Anywhere, away from the sight on the floor, back upwards. To where the stripes of lighting tubes hang, still swinging, more violent now, like the bodies on the floor, the images popping behind Todd’s eyes, they way they’re banished again by that voiceless pilot in his head, trying to protect him from what looking is doing to his mind.

One sharp _crack_ and one of those chains is breaking, dislodging a strip of lights, and shaking the line of tubes from their home. 

The smash the first three tubes make against the floor is deafening. Ear-splitting and shrieking, like it’s happening inside his skull and not in the room at all. 

The fourth tube holds on a second longer, catching at the end and tipping, changing from the angle that sent the other three smashing straight down. The fixture seems unwilling to let this last one drop, clinging on desperately and the weight of the light _wanting_ to fall snaps the trapped edge of it, breaking it off in a flurry of _pops_ and glass dust. 

The fourth tube sails through the air, like a diving swan. The jagged tip piercing the side of Todd’s neck, sticking in, taking hold.

Todd made a startled noise, the sound of the cry being instantly swallowed by a thick, wet gurgle. Blood, hot and roping soaked down his collarbone and chest. His first coherent thought is not at the pain, still delayed a moment by the shock of the sudden violence. Rather, it’s of the warmth of it, seeping into and clinging to the fabric of his shirt, sticking it down, hot and wet against his skin.

His next though it a jutted, primal series of fractured commands, that voiceless part of his mind no longer voiceless, no longer numbingly silent. 

_Blood. Neck. Stop.  
Run. Out. Get out.   
Get it out.  
Get it OUT. _

A dizzy wave, vertigo, a plummeting feeling in his stomach, like lead balls. Commands his hands feel but can’t act on. The red at the edge of his vision clotting now, turning dark, taking the room with it along with the shapes on the floor. 

His eyes and the whole room going black. A hazy, bogged down thought swimming in, _at least I won’t have to look again._ But as he loses his balance, rocks to the side, the traitorous movement wrenches the weight of his eyes, redirects them like a flood lamp. Amanda looks back at him.

Blood leaks out like a rust stain against his clothes, and he thinks in a very dazed way how strange it is, that he had fallen to stare her in the face without feeling the fall, the ground beneath him. 

Another wave of vertigo, this one confusing and correcting. Her face is blurry, now gaining focus - details he doesn’t want, tries to fight against seeing - but they brighten, fanning out the darkness that had nearly been eclipsing. 

He’s somehow still standing. She’s in front of him. Not sick or dead, twisted on the ground, but in front of him with gripping hands. Her eyes alit and on him.

She takes the words from that protective piece of his mind, puts some muscle behind them. 

“Pull it out, Todd.”

And he tries. Hands so desperate to obey flying up to encircle the puncture. It’s a vile, foreign thing. Lodged into his skin, chewing a hole through the tissue, cold and alien. 

But he gets a hold of it. It takes too many tries, his hands slicked up and shaking, but he gets hold of it. It’s cold against his palms, the blood hot against his skin. With the aid of her shouting, the adrenaline turning his heart into an engine - ready to stall, to blow up on impact, he pulls it out. 

He feels every shard of it. But it’s out, and his hands give out. The jagged, too-white, cruel thing is dropped it to the floor to smash.

There’s no spray of blood against the walls. 

Clapping his hand to his neck, he’s certain in a sudden giddy thought that he’ll draw it away dry, and unsliced. _Wendimoor,_ he thinks, his hand slick against the skin, eyes still closed, jaw gritting. Room spinning, head spinning. The sight of Amanda, caged and calling to him. The first time an attack had turned into a connection, of her to him, and that’s all this has been. 

He pulls his hand away. But the blood remains.

His eyes open. Enough to see the red still there, and blurting out against the floorboards. 

The _bare_ floorboards.

The bodies, bits of screws, all gone. The floor is empty, just coated with a gleaming varnish of his own blood, still pumping from the puncture in his throat onto the ground.

“Fight it,” Amanda says, a world of force behind her voice, and again, he tries to obey. But his vision is all red now, red like the room had been, first stepping into it. The vessels in closed eyes, bared against the sun. The sun - so low in the sky. Again that pull, that urge. 

He sways, nearly falls, but catches himself with a jolting forward step. The door. The doorway he and Dirk had come through, where had it gone, where had _Dirk_ gone? Amanda’s voice, chanting now. 

“Fight it, Todd. _Fight_ this.” 

Moving in staggering lurches, the hole in his neck retching up large splotches of blood that escape through his fingers, land on the floor. 

The walls are spinning, a dizzy, nauseous feeling growing, moving from his stomach to his lungs, like he had taken in large mouthfuls of water, breathed it in, and greedy, swallowed more. It tastes like oil and iron. Sinking to the bottom, one hand splaying against the floor, still trying desperately to do as she says, is still repeating, but it’s garbled, warped like those too-far radio stations.

The radio in the car. Snapping so impatiently between stations. Todd stumbles, falls heavy to his knees.

The blood, the present, red, _there_ still somehow _there_ dripping onto the floor in great splashing dollops. 

And taking form. It’s shapeless at first, but the edges purposefully curving, impossible from the angle to fall so smoothly -

_Impossible that it’s still falling and I haven’t,_ a so-close to coherent thought slides into Todd’s mind. It’s a downpour, painting the floor, paint spatters on the floor.

_The radio in the car. The yellow paint. Yellow light, turning red, red blood on the floor, turning into_ \- 

The shape of a bird in flight, wings outstretched, angling away from where he’s certain the door was, the door leading to the little cove room, the corridor, the doorframe where he had lost Dirk. 

_Dirk._ And with this final, fully formed, coherent thought, Todd tries to rise. His body doesn’t respond at first, spinning out in the iron grips of shock. But his eyes rise. They see her, still standing in front of him, but she’s not really there. She says the words as soon as he thinks them. 

“- not really there. Todd, it’s not really there,” and in that moment, neither is she. Not fully, and he can see through her. See through her and onto the floor where he’s trailed blood - trailed it in perfectly bird-shaped droplets. Leading a path - breadcrumbs in the woods - to the opposite side of the room. To a door that wasn’t there when he entered it. And on the floor before that door is another bird - this one garishly yellow, and now all the blood on the floor is garishly yellow, that final bird by the door with a beak that looks much more to Todd like an arrow sign. 

Looking at the beak - the arrow - he does rise to his feet. And the blood flow stops like it had never started.


	8. Out of the House on Rafferty Place

Todd doesn’t follow the arrow out into the next room.

While every misfiring nerve in his body is begging, moaning for him to leave the red room - it’s not red anymore, it’s another strain of that sick too-bright yellow - to move forwards on his own feels wrong. As wrong as following that implanted dead-Dirk into the tunnel that had manifested through his fear. 

He slowly retreats instead, his legs feeling newborn and not to be trusted. Riddled with tremors, they carry him in a wavering line back into the doorway of the yellow room - that transitional threshold they had last been together.

The lights seem displeased at his backwards motion, and they flicker overhead. A rippling line of lights going dim - it’s another pattern, another arrow, a coursing motion urging him towards the other door. 

_No!_ he thinks stubbornly, his legs gaining a slight tremble of strength as he steps back again, unsure of the choice but damn sure that he’s not going any further alone. 

One hand jerks out to catch his balance, still malformed and clumsy beneath his swaying weight. His hand slides out through the hollow air, sweeping through the space to his right where Dirk had stood before he vanished. 

His feet try to find a stable purchase on the floor while his right hand hooks like a claw through the air. _He had been here,_ he thinks furiously, _he had been right HERE._

Close enough to touch - how their hands had almost touched - that subconscious movement, unnoticed by the control centre of his brain. His vision draws back lazily, pitching the room out of focus like a thin blanket of fog had invaded his eyes. A shock response - sweeping damage control kind of daze, and he shakes his head violently to be rid of it. Gritting his teeth - chewing down on the reality, the details of the wooden door frame, he forces himself to stay present. A cracking backhanded strike against his own mind’s attempt to soften the situation. 

Todd delivers one of these mental backhands to himself as well once the room snaps back into crisp and grainy detail. One harsh _crack_ to his just-past self for not reaching out and taking hold of Dirk when he had had the chance. The chance, and the urge - it had felt intrinsic, a needy and forceful notion, just before the room. To snag the edge of Dirk’s jacket, to lock his fingers around his wrist. 

_God, he had been RIGHT HERE!_ Angry, the last shockwaves of raving terror pulling at him, and peeling away into a haunted swell of despair, he swings his arm through the empty space. Muscles and tendons still tight from the onslaught of the nerves and adrenaline, his hand points helplessly at the wall, fingers curling up in a snarl. 

It’s as blank as the others walls had been, but up close to it now, his eyes desperately open, he scours it. Whether he’s half-expecting some new terror to display itself or searching for some imprint - some trace of a shadow where Dirk had been - he’s uncertain. 

He can see there’s a texture to it. Water damage, maybe, or just time. The paint looks bulging, not unlike how the shape of the red room walls had bulged, but this more subtle. The plaster jumping out away from the bones of the house, like the outer layer had been soaked with condensation and had time to dry, uneven and uncared for.

Both hands reach out towards the wall now. It’s a bracing, smoothing motion, like a man lost in a thick fog, or advancing through total darkness. The wall looks back impassively, paint bulging and pale, and under the glare of the too-yellow light, the dizzying smell of the frying paint, it seems to flow like waves.

His fingers get closer, extending now to convince himself that they’re really there, that this isn’t some new trick. He takes a step closer, feet dragging against the floorboards. Ready to feel the grit of the plaster beneath his palms, maybe air pockets beneath the drywall that he can push down.

There’s no grit or dryness when he makes contact. Like in the room before, backed against the wall, heat peels off from the paint and plaster, pressing readily into his palms. Todd’s hands flinch back from the wall, though it wasn’t hot enough to burn - not like the paint against the lightbulbs, the red room against his retinas. 

Cautious but incredulous, he presses his hand to the wall again. Again, the feeling of the red room’s wall licks back up at him. What he had accepted as a piece of the red room remains - an immersive part of the invasive, full body hallucination effect - brought on by his fevered brain’s unintentional associations. Red, fire, danger. 

The walls shift beneath his hand, stimulated by the touch. What should have felt like brick and drywall, something immobile, firm and solid, is pulsing, hot against his skin. Repressing the shudder that offers up from some bone-deep part of him, Todd presses his hands further.

And his hands sink into the wall. 

☛

The sinking feeling of the walls is replicated inside his stomach, and his fingers breach something wet and membraneous. The paint layer folds around his wrists like steaming skin, and for the moment, his breath catching in his lungs, he’s consumed by the shifting, breathing pulsing walls of the house. 

The edges of Todd’s mind advance as his fingers do, creeping with a deep-rooted curiosity he’s not sure belongs to him. His mind - while partly begging his hands to retreat from within the wet-dry-wall - begins imagining all sorts of dark things inside the walls. Imaging sharp things, teeth and daggers, coming for the blind and helpless reach of his fingers. Not having to imagine the wet pressure, clinging to him on all sides. 

Then within the dark, his hands outstretched and feeling, he makes contact with someone else inside the walls. Something more like skin than the warm and gloating weight of the walls, the layer of paint just pretending to be skin. His fingers press on, in, probing with a deftness passed down from centuries of curiosity and danger. 

There’s one more moment of that awful imagining, and anticipation of a bite a slice an attack he has no way to protect against and then that other warm thing inside the wall is gripping him latching on with a wet and cloying desperation.

And the shock - though he had been expecting something to grab him all along, hadn’t he? - the _shock_ and he’s just not sure, uncertain of anything that isn’t the feeling of this unseen warm and gripping hold.

His hands realize before the rest of him does that he’s touching another body. But this one isn’t carrying the raw clammy feeling that Amanda’s body - the imposter corpse - had held. 

This one reacts to him in a spasm. A convulsing _reach_ like a plant towards the sun. Todd thinks of the sun as the warmth and wetness bleats out at him from the walls. Thinks of how it had looked at them contemplatively as they snuck into the house. Thinks of how low it must be now, gone completely over the horizon, and with this he’s wrenching backwards, hands locked tight and together around the thing in the darkness inside the walls.

When Dirk slips out from the slick pocket of the wall it’s with the force and sound of a foetal animal in a darkened farmhouse. 

Todd can feel everything all at once - another jolt of consciousness that violent episodes brings. The wracking vibrancy of motions, and it bombards his system, shaking him with the rattle of a wet cough. 

Dirk’s hands, slick with whatever was lining the walls, trapped in a frantic hold around his own. The weight of his heart in his chest, slamming out an unfollowable rhythm. The precarious weight of the handheld radio in his pocket, slipping out with the impact of Dirk’s body against his. The vibration through his shoes as it smashes against the floor. The crash it makes against the wooden floorboards is followed by the sound of Dirk’s lungs drawing in a sodden and thick breath. 

Todd’s own lungs seem to have forgotten how to breathe, but he pushes through the lightheaded and crushing feeling, trying to speak. 

He’s not sure if he says anything that isn’t Dirk’s name, and doesn’t get any kind of response out loud, just Dirk’s grip on him, the burning flicker of the lights above. 

The shock is still with Todd. At first it was shock at being so suddenly alone, and then the shock of everything inside the red room, inside his head. And this new shock at those both being over, a wet and wracking reunion, but whatever the house is doing to them not being over. Too many fractures, too many conflicting states, and with this new, insistent shock, Todd succumbs to it. Damage control knocking again, begging to take over, and this time he lets it. 

He stops trying to fight against the blur, and the focus leaves his eyes, redirecting to his muscles. Motor control and memory take the wheel. He grabs Dirk with enough force he expects to bruise instantly or form hand-shaped trenches against his skin and body, custom made for Todd’s grip. 

Dirk’s body is shaking but pliant, and he harbours no argument as Todd drags him away from the wall - a pulsing slit carved into the paint disguise - and out of the room. The little cove welcomes them back, this time with a frantic feeling catching at the backs of Todd’s legs. A dark-woods feeling of being followed, stalked by the occupants of the red room behind them, the unseen mouth inside the walls. 

Todd drags them both away from that feeling.

At first the mouth of the corridor looks daunting, an imposing dot of black against the blinding yellow all around them. But Todd merely clenches his jaw and aims for it, with no hesitancy left inside of him. 

Holding on to Dirk is harder than thinking about what had happened - or how much of it hadn’t happened, how much of it makes sense, and Todd is fogged up, loopy, grateful for the distraction, and throws himself into the grapple. 

Dirk is greased up with the innards of the house, slick fluid lining the walls like insulation, like fat surrounding joints, and it pastes Todd’s shirt down to his skin where it mixes with his own sweat.

Dirk’s body moves like he’s been paralyzed, feet splaying against the floor to hold himself up, but toppling forward, skidding against the snail-wet marks he’s leaving. He doesn’t protest as Todd slithers into the passageway, pulling Dirk in behind him by the wrists. 

“Come on, come on, come on,” Todd starts chanting, every heave of his arms tugging them both along through the now-unlit hallway. He can feel the strained muscles in his abdomen cramping up with every pull. Dirk follows, the pressure between them too abrupt and desperate to allow a second separation in the darkness. 

The effort of keeping them both upright eclipses the other frets and branches in Todd’s mind. Eyes useless in the dark, he closes them to press his focus into his form, the damp slime of Dirk’s skin, the way his faltering body in the black feels drained, ready to drop. 

But Dirk still seems to have enough strength left in him to hold tight, throwing himself along the path with uncoordinated lurches. It’s not enough to steer, especially in the lightless tunnel, and as Todd pulls them backwards - heels burrowed in the floor, body heaving at a forty-five degree angled tilt - Dirk slams into the sidelines as they make a turn. 

No one freezes this time to wait for the rocking waves of furniture to slow and settle. The fear of an avalanche burns cold and suffocating around them, but Todd casts the fear away - damage control shooting down foreign missiles. Better to be buried in it, he thinks through the fog. Better to die here than back there, better to die closing off the trail.

The masses in the darkness don’t fall, just chatter together, gossiping with unseen threats as they pull further through the corridor. Until they’re spilling out into an open room, the emptiness in the dark too vast and void to offer any comfort.

“Let’s go,” Todd gasps, every fibre of his body charged and screaming, and his words come out more texture than tone. He can feel the wideness of the room attempt to slow them down. Turn them around, dizzy spins of black confusion, to lure them back into the deep. 

Dirk tries to respond, but the only thing that comes out is a low-throat, garbled whine, wet as his skin and clothes. Todd realizes sickly that the stuff is inside him, in his mouth and inhaled further, insulating him too. Todd points them forwards, following the arrow in his chest, the _get out_ animal compass that’s the only thing inside him keeping still. 

He gets them through the rooms. They’re not silent as they were before, but creaking and humming, defiant at their exit. The whole body of it - ceiling, floors, and wet-lined walls, all groaning like support beams in duress.

But the baying wood and bulging, breathing thing beneath can’t catch hold of them - Todd nothing more than a skeleton amped with adrenaline, Dirk breathing fiercely in his own defiance. Todd can feel his resolve starting to crack, to peel off like chipped yellow paint, and he bears down, one final burst of that frantic, violent drive. 

One final heave - like he’s birthing them through the front door of the house - and they’re outside standing splayed in a joint-locked tremble. 

☞

The first thing Todd notices once they’re out of the house is the colours. He’s hyperaware of them.

The shade and sheer depth of the sky, how it’s holding onto the last glow of the sun, hiding just beneath the horizon. Dark blues, purples, that scraping line of fading crimson. He imagines he’s seeing like an animal would, like an insect.

The clouds, the buildings, the gravel, the fence, all grey, grey, grey. But there’s the brightness of his palms against Dirk’s knuckles, the dull and foggy blur of his eyes. Bright red, sodden blue. He’s thinking sirens, ambulance lights, the world blurring, fading, becoming a smear that he can’t seem to focus on.

It’s the post-attack vibrance that life holds, over saturated and whirling. Migraine-sharp, the bite and gaudy sheen that sends him crawling into bed, but now he breathes it in, gulps it down, giddy for the nauseas _real_ of it pounding in his head. 

Farah’s there in an instant - she must have been parked just outside of Todd’s perception. She closes the distance between them, kicking up a cloud of dust - more grey that infiltrates his vision.

She’s upset, talking too quickly, picking up like she had been talking to herself while they were gone - _how long were they gone?_ The sky gone grey, black, blue, lightless, lifeless like the layer of dark clouds, like deep internal bleeding bruising out above their heads.

She’s asking why they haven’t been answering - in his head Todd can hear the sound of the handheld radio hitting the floor, he can also hear Amanda’s voice, the smashing of fluorescent strips, Dirk screaming.

She’s asking if they’re alright, and Todd’s head feels underwater, grey grey grey and too bright lights. Yellow birds and bloody hands, Farah’s hands, the nails bright and pink-tipped reaching in for them, pulling them towards the car, away from the house - the house that’s bigger on the inside, that isn’t a house at all.

He can feel himself babbling, words dripping like rabid spit from his mouth, trying to explain, and it’s not getting through to her. He can see it on her face, stricken with heightened panic, the crease between her brows fierce and angry with concern, and she’s still reaching out to pull at them, pull them away, pull answers out of them, like pulling teeth.

She pulls them through the fence, torn open now though he missed the moment she did that.  
Her hands on the side of his neck, trying to get him to look at her but _god_ his head is spinning, colours whirling, and he’s thinking carnival rides, sweat and metal and neon lights, thinking that he’s going to throw up. 

So he does, digs his heels to scrape into the gravel and turns to the side - the empty side that’s not supporting Dirk, silent and plastered to him. Todd vomits onto the ground, stringy, acidic and lurching - bile ducts - and lets Farah keep pulling them. 

He can see the car now. Black and eternal in its lack of colour, and he’s grateful for something that’s not blinding or so flat and grey.

She’s asking what _happened_ asking why Dirk’s wet, asking what was in there? And Todd can’t answer any of it, can only lean his weight into her and push Dirk into the car. Dirk falls into the backseat like he’s been folded, and Todd doesn’t remember climbing in after him, doesn’t remember the drive home, just the blur of grey and darkened colours outside the window, the dance of red and yellow in his head. 

It’s the same kind of daze that would take him over after those first attacks. His body so unused to the onslaught, nerves and veins searing with rocket fuel. He hates what he knows comes next. Fatigue and stale pain and that god awful headache that’s already pounding tight against his skull. And his temper - his biting tone and rogue tongue, pacing on the sidelines. Though it stays there for now, held back by the last of the strained endorphins keeping him locked into the pilot’s seat. He wants to keep it there - his temper, his snappish defences - as it’s never a fair fight against Farah’s patience, her forgiveness.

And Farah is there, just like she had been there then with those first episodes. And Dirk’s there, even though he hadn’t been, even though he’s not-there now in some other way. 

Also present is the crushing feeling in his chest, that breathing-in-the-water feeling. In his head he sees water spilling from his mouth, running clear as Farah wrenches the car away from the construction site, tires squealing with delight as they feast on the gravel beneath.

Staring and almost unseeing out the window, Todd latches onto the way the clouds are wrapped around the stretch of the horizon. Falling back, like maybe they don’t want to touch the house either. He thinks - or the thought is deposited into his frying mind - that maybe he is somehow more in touch with the instincts than he knew.

That the feeling pressing from the casting clouds this morning really had been trying to tell him something, some warning thing, some wordless message he wasn’t fully formed enough to understand. And that golden light inside, cast in from the sun, filtered through the windows, gold and silence wrapped around Farah, around him, how it had tried and failed to hold them, keep them inside.

☞

Todd walks in a shuffling, uneven way, following Farah into the apartment. He gets as far as the living room and collapses, barely managing to catch himself. Pressing his back into the edge of the couch he had just missed, he exhales, one long, shaky breath that twists and catches on its way out. 

“Come on,” Farah is saying, and Todd looks up in time to see her passing the doorway with her arm slung under Dirk’s armpit, supporting his weight and pulling him down the hall. He stumbles against her, like his legs aren’t working, and they both grind to a stop, Farah looking over her free shoulder to where Todd is slumped. 

“Are you going to be alright out here?” She asks, and her voice is so sharp, imploringly ferocious, and all Todd can do is nod numbly. She looks over him a moment longer. Through the haze he can see the inner workings of her mind, spinning, calculating. And then she’s shifting her weight to support more of Dirk’s, and pulling him down the hall. 

Then he’s left on the living room floor by himself. And it’s not ideal but it’s better than that other room, that not-real room. Though now, and his hands splay for purchase on the tiled floor, he can’t be certain that this now-room is real either.

He can hear her voice filtering from down the hall, but not the words it’s saying. He doesn’t hear Dirk responding. 

The nerves in his back feel fried, still faintly electric, and with each breath and pulse of his heart - still too fast, but slowing down - he expects to feel another razor-edged shard of glass. Swallowing, willing his breathing to settle into something manageable, he’s still surprised when he doesn’t feel a hot jet of blood entering his airway. 

The anticipation of another warm, wet jolt of pain is too much, and he’s rising uneasily to his feet again. Moving like a zombie into the kitchen, pushing the Kcups out of the way to grab his pill bottle. He doesn’t hear the Kcups rattle to the floor as he opens the bottle and downs two, just for the reassurance they bring. Once he’s swallowed, and registered the pods on the floor, he can hear the shower turning on. Then footsteps, fast and purposeful, back down the hall. 

Farah’s headed for the living room, but skids to a stop when she sees Todd bracing against the kitchen counter. 

“Whew,” he says, in place of a greeting, or anything sensical when she hovers in the doorway, looking him over. 

“What. Happened,” she deadpans, and Todd draws in another long, thin breath before trying to answer. Her face is bared, frozen in its expression, the light in her eyes _on_ , angry and terrified. 

“Time doesn’t work in that house,” is the first thing he says, and pauses, swallowing. He feels the ghosts of his pills sliding down his throat. And the ghost of the glass shards in his neck, warping his words and keeping the skin there tight and freezing. “And I think electronics, too.” 

“That’s why you didn’t answer me?” Farah asks carefully. Senses are coming back to him now, though dull, there’s enough perception to know that it’s one of thousands of questions she has, waiting in a lethal queue. 

“The first room we answered, and then again when we got back outside to see if we missed anything,” Todd says, and shivers suddenly, wracking and violent, as if his body had just registered that he was going to have to relive it, if only to recount it to Farah. Farah, who’s looking at him with a raging storm locked behind both eyes, who deserves an explanation. 

“It hadn’t felt like time had passed in between,” he continues, wishing there was something he could say to defuse the fire in her expression, the tightness to her body, angled at him from the doorway.

“What _happened?_ ” She asks, and Todd shakes his head, hands splaying further out on the counter. He looks down, seeing the wet smears of his handprints against the granite. 

“It was so much bigger on the inside. I don’t know how many more rooms there were. They were empty at first... and then they weren’t. There was a trail - ”

“For Dirk?” She asks sharply, cutting him off, though the waxiness of his words were begging her to step in, soft and crumbling. He knows what she means. A series of things, extraordinary and seamless, pieces for Dirk to find and place together, creating a picture no one else could have formed. But the house, sitting there behind the fence, proud amid the dust, almost _wanting_ to be found. Unlocked, for unsuspecting souls to enter. Where however many people _had_ entered. And how many had come back out? 

“For anyone, maybe,” he answers, haltingly. “There was a _literal trail,_ painting on the floors - ” _like breadcrumbs, like a magic house in the woods with a monster that eats kids,_ he thinks wildly, and has enough control over his mind to clamp his mouth shut so he doesn’t say that part too. “I don’t know how we got separated,” he says instead, and can feel the creeping emptiness, the cold grip of dread around the back of his neck, collecting in the form of clammy sweat across his palms, the backs of his knees. 

“We both went into a room, and then he was gone. And Amanda was there - ”

 _“Amanda?”_ Farah asks, impossibly.

“And you,” Todd continues, hearing the way his voice sounds higher and shakier, and so, _so_ far away, but can’t think of any way to stop it. “And you were both dead, and the ceiling had these lights, and they broke, and I don’t know if I had an attack or if that room was just pretending to give me one, but it all felt so _real_ ... ” He wants to go further, to tell her how it smelled, the paint cooking on the bulbs, the blood coming off the bodies onto his hands, the way the walls stretched out, bulging over the straight lines where a _real_ room would have the decency to obey the laws of physics. 

But he can’t say anything else, just looks up at her helplessly, sees that she sees too, and understands enough to cross the distance that’s been piling up between them, arms snaking out to enclose around him. And he’s sagging, falling into the press of her body. 

Farah locks her arms together behind his back, squeezes, hard enough to press the air from his lungs and the last piece of ghost-glass from his airway goes with it. It’s familiar in how crushing it is. The post-attack vibrancy, how cruel the weight of the air feels between them, her scent, his fear.

“You said you got separated. How did you find Dirk?” She asks, loosening her grip enough to let him inhale, speaking into the side of his scalp. 

“He was inside the walls,” he breathes, feeling his words come out and lap against the side of her neck, rich in a scent that wasn’t sweat, or blood, or dirt. “I reached into the walls and we ran.” 

☞


	9. Back Inside the Agency

Dirk spends the next hour in the bathroom with the shower running. It’s a white noise, stressed static in the background. Todd’s mind is buzzing too, and the sound of it reminds him of running his hand across a television screen, feeling the hot hum lift off of the glass and into his skin. That white-hot _crack,_ the shock of separation.

Through the buzz Todd thinks that Farah feels it too, and they both keep their distance, though the air feels alive with electricity, both ready to jolt like batteries. 

Todd explains what happened as best he can, and Farah listens with a flawlessly constructed mask of calm patience. 

He can tell she’s shaken by the end of his story and he’s grateful when she doesn’t push with more questions. He knows she has them, buckets full, stewing inside. He knows it as well as she knows what’s inside him - that tense sting of exhaustion mixing with that post-attack defensive snap. 

She doesn’t persist, and he can feel the sag of relief throughout his whole body, already starting to ache. He can feel the grip of a downpour on his shoulders. The weight of something awful being done with, but still being awake, not yet done with the night. 

He feels dirty. Sweat drying into a tacky sheen beneath his clothes, dust and debris and the phantom stain of blood across his skin. He wants it off, all of it, but more than that he just wants to be finished with it.

The effort of a shower seems too much - to stand, to scrub off the grime, to dry off again. That anger feeding on the throb in his temples practically berates him for considering it and he shrugs off Farah’s offer for food or tea too. 

The Dirk-shaped absence in the room with them tugs at Todd like a black hole, and Farah seems to pluck this from his mind - spilling out before her from his ears. His headache spreads down both sides of his face like a bridle. 

“I should check on him,” Farah says, and as if waiting for the cue, the shower shuts off. 

Todd follows her down the hall, intent on checking out, detaching from the day. He lets his body coast with the shuffling intent of going into his own room, his bed, and tuning out the world. He feels like a buried mine, dirty and ready to explode at whoever comes closest.

Instead he witnesses the moment Dirk steps out from the bathroom and sees Farah’s approaching figure, and flinches hard, knocking himself into the door with a solid _thud._

He witnesses the verbal flinch too.

“Really, I’m fine Farah, perfectly fine. Bit of a morbid scene back there, every day a new adventure in this line of work, isn’t that the case?” Farah moves towards him, into the line of firing chatter, and he backs up, raising his hands like a shield and continuing to speak, faster now. Todd hovers back in the shadows of the unlit agency, his route to bed blocked, terribly captivated by the marathon of frantic words. 

“Really, no need to insist, and it’s late, isn’t it? It must be late, and you’ve been out all day and up this whole time, shouldn’t you really be getting to bed? I wouldn’t want to keep you up, and - ”

“Fine,” Farah says, immediate and silencing. It’s a thin tread of the surfacing anger still coming to a boil in Todd’s blood. And a direct parallel to Dirk’s response, just before the red room. The comparison has Todd shivering in the dark despite the fire raging in his skin and temples. 

“I just wanted to make sure - ” Todd can see the shadow of her arm rising against the wall. It’s almost a truce gesture, a sweeping hand, reaching out to reassure. 

“That I’m alright. And I am. Are you? Surely you’ve had just as long of a day - more so now if you’re still up and active, probably time for bed, don’t you think? Lack of sleep often results in a whole myriad of unwelcome traits, irritability, delusions - ”

“Dirk - ”

“Need to have our main brains and muscle sharp for the next case, don’t we? Maybe we should start one of those diet and fitness regimes as a branch of the agency, once I met a woman who claimed that all the animals she had been in previous lives followed her like an aura and could point her towards vegetables containing higher amounts of cosmic nutrition - ” 

“Next case, what...?” Farah is struggling now, making big splashes in the water.

“I’m sure I still have her card, we could team up and rebrand - ”

“Enough!” Farah snaps suddenly. It’s not so much an outburst as a sharply wielded whip-crack.

“Whatever you went through in there has clearly affected you. You don’t have to get into it with me, but you need to slow down - ” the shadow of her hands, raising now in prayer, like she’s trying to soothe a wild horse.   
Todd steps in closer to their exchange, perhaps lured by the snapping of Farah’s whip. He’s still soaked in shadows, and the same ones are framing the other two, the light spilling from the bathroom casting them in a comparing glow.

He’s close enough now to see the panicked rise and fall of Dirk’s chest, wrapped tightly in a towel and tighter in self defence. It hitches higher as Dirk continues to talk, high in his throat and imitating innocence badly. 

“Don’t be ridiculous Farah everything is _fine,”_ that word again, Todd can feel his temper flaring like a forked tongue, and it’s Farah’s breaking point too. 

“Okay!” Farah says, almost shouting, but the hush of the hour keeps it from escalating. 

“I spent the entire day out there trying to find any information that could help while you two dove headfirst into a hell-house where time doesn’t work. No one replied to my radio calls, and I spent _hours_ collecting as much information as I could fine, and waiting outside, wondering if I should go in after you, and when you finally appeared, you - ” she spins tightly on her heels, brandishing a finger at Todd that drags him into it - “could barely string a sentence together, and _you_ \- ” her hands aren’t soothing anymore, but thrusting back at Dirk, pleading and accusing - “were catatonic! And I get you back - _carry you_ back, and you give me _this?_ I can’t. I can’t deal with this. You’re going to break my brain, Dirk. Todd!”

He jumps, startling into the spilled light at the sharp call of his name.

“Ha!” He says, confused at how the sound came out without him meaning to. 

“You need to - ” again, her hands, gesturing and helpless now - “assist!”

“Assist. Right. Assisting, assistant,” he says. The words come out thick and moronic, chewed up by his headache and the weight of the rooms, still sprawling out behind his eyes. His gaze darts between the two, half in half out of the shadows. 

They land on Dirk and stay there. Still standing pressed into the edge of the bathroom doorframe, steam dripping off the walls behind him, he looks exposed and very much cornered. 

Looking back at Todd, Dirk looks apprehensive too, and from his other side Todd can feel Farah seething with helpless good intention. There’s a beat of silence from everyone then, Todd being well aware that it’s his turn to break it. Digging through the building frustration and rage - always red hot and rabid in the wake of his attacks - desperate to find something to say, he takes a steadying breath.

“Next case?” Is what comes out, and he can practically feel Farah gritting her jaw behind him.

“Out with the old, in with the new, isn’t that how it goes?” Dirk says, eyes darting between the two opposing figures in the hall.

“Did you _solve it?_ ” Todd asks, exchanging a tepid look of disbelief with Farah. 

“Solved it, sure,” Dirk says, and seems to deflate a little. The marathon over, muscles locking and lungs cramping.

“Cece Silberman?” Todd prompts, incredulous and the raging anger behind his eyes, the source of his headache and everything else just pulsing for a way out. 

“She’s dead,” Dirk says, his eyes leaking into Todd, and the piercing blue of them pulls him back into the house. It’s the same low-tone of dread he was speaking in before the red room had taken over. Todd grimaces, blinks, and everything goes red again, red behind his eyelids as the rage rattles through his body, refusing to let him be transported back into that house.

“Those missing people are dead too. They went into the house and they never got out again.” Dirk says it with such a low finality that Todd’s stricken into silence again. 

“That’s - that’s not - _that’s not good enough,”_ Farah says, and Todd finds he’s surprised that she’s still standing there. 

“You went in. You went out and broke windows, you went _back in,_ and you got out,” Farah insists, and she’s one decimal shy of breaking into a full-throated shout. 

“I didn’t,” Dirk says. It’s a flat correcting. “If Todd hadn’t there I wouldn’t have gotten out at all.”

“You can’t - you don’t know that,” Todd argues while Farah sputters. But he believes it, in that deep pit of his stomach he can feel the harsh truth of Dirk’s words. The thought of it makes him sick, cold at the centre of his boiling rage of a headache, encroaching on the rest of him now. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Dirk says. “We got out, the rest of them didn’t, Cece’s sister hired us to find out what happened, and I’m saying with all certainty, that she went into that house and didn’t come out again.” 

“I’m going to bed,” Farah says after a towering swell of pained silence washes over the hallway. She doesn’t move to leave though, just stays watching Dirk like he’s planning on bolting. 

“Farah - ” Dirk says, voice tightly balled, the edges of his body lost to the shadows of the hall. 

“Thank you for everything today,” he says, “you always seem to be saving the day when I get us into something stupid and dangerous.” Todd frowns at this and Farah hesitates, finally nodding curtly once. In the motion Todd can see the composure, the sheer effort it’s taking to hold still and silent. He can recognizes in her the need to escape, to remove herself from the situation and the rest of the world - and realizes that it’s his cue to dismiss her from it. 

“See you in the morning,” Todd says, and she nods again, this time less stiffly. He doesn’t miss the worried trace of her eyes across Dirk’s form again, and the weight of responsibility leaving her, passing on to him. 

Once she’s gone, Dirk’s voice softens, falling flat. Like the defensive edge and attempts to deceive and distract left with her.

“I’m sorry I brought you there, Todd,” he says before Todd has the chance to steer the conversation somewhere else.

“I don’t think you did,” Todd says back, trying to speak evenly through the pinching throb at his temples. “I think you just followed whatever it was that was pointing there.” Like the arrows, the birds on the floor, flocking them into the next room and the next one after that. 

“That’s still very much my fault,” Dirk says with a sigh that seems to extend through his entire body. The weight of the day, nipping at his joints and muscles. Todd can feel the bite of it too. 

“Just something else horrible that I’ve dragged you into.” 

“I don’t want to get into a debate about free will again, Dirk,” Todd says, and the flare of annoyance and bitter spite trickles back into his voice. He tries to brush it away, but it lashes out and burns, always chasing his episodes like the tail of a comet. 

“I don’t know what you saw in there, but I’m sure it wasn’t _nice,_ ” Dirk looks pained while he speaks, blinking rapidly like he’s trying to fend off some unwanted image. “I don’t have any answers, or insight to what that was, and I don’t expect you to want anything to do with it even if I did.”

“What happened to you in there?” Todd asks, either unwilling or unable to tackle the depth of anything else Dirk has said. 

“Something I’d rather not get into,” Dirk says back, and it’s rapid too, all defensive armour, and there’s a wet shine to his eyes. “Consider yourself off the case,” Dirk says next, throwing Todd wildly off balance. Disoriented, the brewing rage inside his head snatches up more territory. 

“Fuck that,” Todd snaps, and Dirk jumps slightly at the force of his tone. Todd jumps too, realizing a moment too late that it’s the headache, the rage, the post-attack version of himself that’s taken over, frustrated and violent, and all his worst traits. He’s helpless to stop it, though, weighed down by the hour, the house, the layer of drying sweat beneath his clothes. He can taste the outburst before it manifests, meaty and sour and a long time coming.

“You can’t materialize into my life and call me your assistant and then bail - you drag me through whatever whimsical circumstances fall into your lap and then you try to ditch it all as soon as it gets too messed up to talk about.” It comes out spitting and writhing, a venomous snake of words and it coils around Dirk in the hallway, locking him tight and immobilized. 

“It’s not fair to drag you into things where I can’t tell the outcome,” Dirk says back, the grip on his towel now a white-knuckled gleam in the half light. “People keep dying and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. You keep almost dying and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. It’s not fair when _I_ mess up and get us into something bad I can’t get us back out again.” It’s a cold and gasping one-breathed delivery and Todd’s own burning heat and fury bristles against it. 

“Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that the reason I’m here?” He demands, and Dirk looks stunned at the response, like he was expecting a deference, or Todd to agree and give in to the despair of the night stroking at their shadows. They’re laying together, twisted on the floor. 

“That is the reason, isn’t it?” Todd continues in the wake of Dirk’s damp and silent stare. “To pull you off your own bullshit? I’m used to the monsters and machines, but I can’t get used to you pretending like you’re okay with it.” Dirk takes a breath while Todd startles himself into temporary silence - he _had_ gotten used to it, he realizes. Though the headache heavy rage inside his head isn’t sated yet. 

“It’s one thing if it’s some external force that’s trying to kill us. It’s a whole other problem if it’s just you spinning out or shutting down and not letting anyone close enough to help you,” Todd says, regaining a portion of control before the venom seeps back in. _Trying to help,_ he tries to remind himself. The way Dirk is looking at him, eyes dripping like the condensation on the walls behind him makes Todd falter, grappling with the burning bite of anger that wants its body back.

“It shouldn’t be your job to help me,” Dirk finally says, his voice folding pathetically in on itself, and it between the cracks of his words Todd can see something else awful and hollow. All the gaps and empty parts where no one has ever bothered to try. 

“You’re the one who _gave me_ the fucking job in the first place,” Todd says, recovering from the uncomfortable revelation and kicking back with more malice. “If you don’t let me help you then you’re not letting me do the job that you assigned me. I don’t care if you drag me into fucked up shit, just don’t make me feel useless after the fact!” He doesn’t mean for it to come out as ragged and fiery as it does. But that’s how it happens, and the silence that follows is ruptured only by the sounds of hot coals smouldering throughout the room. 

Dirk looks at him, eyes wide but still, and that same stillness expands as Todd looks back at him, unblinking, taking in his shape, standing at the door. 

His shoulders still, drawing narrow and close to his body, his hands stilling at his sides, moving to find purchase in pockets that aren’t there, then giving up the search to press against his legs. 

There’s something hanging over them, draped across the expanse of the ceiling between them in the hall. A shifting weight, bated breath, the hum of the apartment.

_What now?_ it asks. 

_What now?_ Dirk’s eyes, caught on Todd’s and unmoving as a mirrored lake. 

_What now?_ and Todd has no answers, no solution. He thinks of the aggression, the decisiveness in Farah’s body as she crossed the kitchen to grab hold on him. He thinks of how he doesn’t have the energy, but it’s the energy he needs to have.

Instead what he’s grabbing hold of is the idea that he’s holding Dirk captive, both in the doorway and the moment. Without the energy - the decisiveness that Farah wields so weightlessly - he backs away instead. 

Falling short, again. 

But the feeling of despairing wrongness keeps him in the hall. How wrong it feels to leave him - high and dry - when Todd’s lungs still feel wet and ragged, filled with stones and sinking fast. 

“I can’t think straight,” Todd says through the stones. A rocky, heavy sigh that slams into the ground and leaves a hole. There’s holes in his head, too. Holes demanding to be filled with decisions, solutions. Through the tension gripping him like sharpened wires, he searches for them both. 

“Sleep,” he says next, passing the reins to that wild animal part of his mind, his body, sagging with the weight of it all. 

“Let’s get some sleep. We can deal with it tomorrow,” _or the day after_. He wants more than a night’s worth, wants to close his eyes and not face the next morning. A binging of unconsciousness.

He ushers Dirk out of the doorway, and motions for him to head down the hallway. Dirk moves easily, either willing enough to obey or smart enough not to fight the current of tense frustration and aggressive fatigue shifting underneath Todd’s skin. 

Todd follows him, feeling enough like a beleaguered sheepdog to be annoyed with himself. He feels just shy of rabid, too. Snapping and tense.

Leaving their stances at the door and pointing down the stretch of hallway - dark and narrow and far too reminiscent - Dirk falters, posture stiffening at the sight of it. Todd stays behind him, lifting a hand to press into the flat of his back, a steadying pressure, with enough biting and frothing headache anger to chase away the shadows. They both slide into the hall. 

There’s enough light coming in through the window to light the path into Dirk’s room, and he slips into the pocket of shadows and streetlight. He folds, thinning himself out across the mattress, turning his back to Todd. And the door, the hallway, the rest of the world. 

Todd stands for a moment, feet melting into the cool darkness of the floor. It’s quiet, unearthly so, like his ears have tuned out any external function, too tired for input. There’s no hum of electronics, no creaking of old beams. Another few breaths into the darkness and Todd is following Dirk onto the mattress.

He hardly realizes what he’s doing until the stillness of Dirk’s body turns to a straight line against the mattress, stiff and unprepared, and he turns his neck. Startled and awake, a jagged interrobang adding to the ceiling’s question.

_What now?!_ and Todd still has no answers, just lies down next to him, leaving a strip of that strange silence between them. No noise, no answers, though his hands seem to understand, and he reaches out, through the dark of the space between them. With one arm he props himself up against the pillows, and the other cuts in like a boat’s stern through choppy waters. It comes to rest on the curve of Dirk’s back, a stroking, gripping motion, grounding them through the waves. 

“Go to sleep,” he says, and Dirk’s head turns back around, settling in, and that startled stiffness leaves his body, sinking into the deeps. 

“Will you stay?” It’s quiet, faint. Dirk asks it to the blank wall in front of him. 

Todd’s face is blank too, held tightly in place, worried that one break in his hold will shatter everything he’s built up. Like one false move and he’ll be back inside that room, keeping company with dead bodies instead of Dirk’s warm and breathing one, unmoving in the darkness. 

“Yeah,” he says, and that’s the end of it. Dirk stays silent, and seems to slip into some other state that Todd hopes is sleep. 

He tries to do the same. Something heavy tries to fight against it inside of him, but the ache in his eyelids is heavier. The hour, the shadows, the weight of those rooms. Todd doesn’t think he could conjure up the energy to have a breakdown, let alone start thinking about what had happened to create that weight. He can feel it, though, and acknowledges that he feels it, hanging like a bag of stones inside his lungs and on the back-burner of his mind. 

That seems to be enough for now, and he drifts off. Not soundly, but surely. 

☞

He dreams of Amanda. Or she sends him a dream. They’re together, back under the writhing glow of the sprawling infinite.

He sees it differently this time. In the quiet of the dark and breathing bedroom, asleep under the weight of exhaustion, it comes crashing into his vision, spreading like waves. A spiralling, spreading pattern. Like loops in a great tapestry, a grid above rhythmic water. 

“Holes,” Amanda says, in her other voice. The one that’s bigger than he is, the one that isn’t angry anymore. 

He sees them, sees them as soon as she says it, and suddenly the overhead loom is dotted with inaccuracies. Small parts where the lines in the pattern have missed their mark, leaving an emptiness in the glow. Areas of hollow light, a crystalline and blue-touched transparency. 

Its the same colour, Todd realizes. Something cold is spreading up his spine, rolling like mercury. He wakes up with a silent jump. It takes a while for the weight of his breaths to compensate for the empty room. By the time morning light is filtering into the windowpane, the dream has faded, chased away by daylight, though he can still faintly hear Amanda’s voice inside his head. 

“Holes. There’s holes.” 

The same colour of Dirk’s silent crying, holes in the pattern, mistakes in the soul of it, leaking out of him. 

☞


	10. The Days After

The thought comes back to Todd as the morning washes over him. Or rather, the feeling comes back. The pararibulitis feeling, the precursor to an attack, dancing with his waking mind in the disorienting light of the day.

It’s a mild attack in comparison to the room inside the house. A thread-thin line of red appearing across his forearm like the shifting of plates deep beneath the ground. The skin starts to slough off as he fully wakes up, and it peels off in a wet sheet. 

He’s too tired for his still-frying brain to really give it it’s all. The searing scream of pain throughout his pretending-to-be-exposed nerves is excruciating, yet also mild enough for him to think _what if this is really happening?_

That thought only lasts a moment before he’s forcing his body into motion. Rolling to the side, dragging himself down the hall and into the kitchen to his stash of medication. 

The attack subsides as quickly as it comes on, and with the same tinges of blurring around the edges of his mind. 

He’s left silent but shaken, running the faint callouses of his fingers across the whole-again patch of his arm, quietly convincing himself it’s over. It’s the _what ifs_ that stick around longer. The lapse in judgement of his surroundings, his shaking reality. It’s always the part that sends him spiralling into that darker, out of control place. 

The feeling stays and dances with the medication, and he’s left in a bright daze. The hour feels false, and something feels off about the apartment. It’s the lighting in the kitchen, the starkness of the sun through the window. It feels mass produced, manufactured, and it digs into his eyes, sensitive and wet. It’s another sprig of doubt in his mind that’s he’s really awake, that he’s really here at all. 

He hardly notices himself picking up the pill bottle after he’s swallowed one, and brings it back into his own bedroom. _Call it a hunch,_ he hears in his head. Dirk’s voice, with that low tone of pessimism he wishes he wasn’t getting used to.

The day winds around him, stretched out in that too-bright way as Todd enters his room. His bed looks at him, welcoming, and beckoning with as much allure as a piece of furniture could conjure. It feels like the coward’s choice, wretched and passive to just crawl back into bed, shutting his eyes for a midday nap immediately after waking. These thoughts aren’t enough to keep him from it, though. 

☞

He wakes up just as disoriented as the first time.

At first he’s not sure what’s woken him, and the fog in the forefront of his mind tries its best to convince him that it’s his first time waking. The thought sticks, greasy to his muddled mind, that he’s caught in some loop. It’s hard to shake the concept as his stomach churns, and the motion is unwanted and familiar. That sudden lurch of dread as an attack sneaks up on him again. The mechanical jolt of cars on the track of some thrill ride.

He lays flat on his back, gripping the sheets in both hands, waiting for the drop.

The action is what brings it on. The blanket catches on his cuticles, and several of his fingernails pull out with entirely too much ease. Like they’re glad to be rid of him. 

It’s then, with the sharp sting at the ends of his fingers accompanying the ache, that he realizes how sore the rest of his body is. Muscles pulled and griping now, groaning with his voice. Shoulders wrenched and core as strained as his patience, and the pain in his hands kicks off in full force. The bite of it has him biting down on his tongue, not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to not notice if he was. The ache spreads though the rest of him, torn from pulling Dirk out of the house, and the thought of it sparks up a chain reaction of pain and tightness. It fans out down the backs of his legs, the tendons in his neck. 

His meds sit and watch him with apathy from his bedside table. He reaches for them, white spots stinging the edges of his vision as the motion through the stale air stings at the exposed soft spots at the ends of his fingers. It comes with the bite and stench of rubbing alcohol, and the lurch in his stomach is working its way up his throat, fierce and bubbling. 

He reaches the bottle but can’t get steady hold of it. It’s somehow working against him and with his hallucination, and his oil-slick fingers keep slipping on the lid.

That fresh, strong part of his mind, still forming, still struggling to keep hold tries to will him on.  
 _Wendimoor. Amanda. Create something. Utilize the pain._ But there’s nothing there to make use of. No wire to grab, no item to manifest into the room. Just the lack of something. Spines and claws, something sharp and strong to strike out or hold on with. Blood and fake pain making the grip of his palms wet and slippery, and he’s angry more than anything else. Angry at his uselessness, his failing grip.

_It’s not really happening, so just fucking_ OPEN! That red bite of heat and rage takes over, and the strong-willed part of his mind fades out, easily forgotten in the wake of the blood and the bottle refusing to open. 

The lid lets up then. Resistance balking open as he pour the pills unceremoniously onto his sheets, knocking one back, chased with the iron-heavy taste of the blood pounding from his fingers, in his ears. 

That thought he had waking that first time takes over once he’s swallowed, and the feeling remains once the attack is back at bay, sulking and dripping in the corner. 

The thought of the house, the feeling it had supplied. The bitter tang of the pills caught on the back of his tongue and down his throat, the damp heat of the attacks, and how the house had supplied him with this one too. 

The thought persists as his nails grow back in, and he gets lost in it.

The room, the entryway, and how it had instilled the feeling of an incoming attack. How standing on the floors there - made of grainy wood and smelling like the underbelly of the city - had felt like the bottom edge of a ravine, looking up into jagged rocks, and waiting for the onslaught.

But it had been more than the feeling of something bad coming, more than the dread of impalement and exposed nerves.

The feeling had remained afterwards - the lack of feeling had, anyway. How despite how vivid, visceral, vicious the attacks were, how real they had felt, clawing into his skin and splitting him apart, there was no residue once they were finished with him. No markings, no bruises, no aftermath of pain. 

And the building - the thing that wasn’t a building, was just pretending to be one - was the same too. There was no blood spattered across his body, no stain against his hands or the ground where the bodies had been. The only feeling was left inside his head, and the nervous shake in his fingers. 

☞

Todd doesn’t realize until afterwards, once he’s showered and dressed and halfheartedly mulled over an afternoon coffee in the kitchen, that the first time he had woken up was in Dirk’s bed alone. 

It’s something he realizes standing in the doorway to his own room, seeing his own bed, unmade and unbloodied, but not nearly so inviting this time around. 

There’s a thought beneath the surface, but it feels sharp and chemical, and he banishes it away. It drips back down. Rubbing alcohol. Wet paint.

Todd can feel himself slipping away. Into that grey space the pills bring on, casting off the vibrancy the attacks leave him with, bright enough to sting. The disconnect feels both necessary and like he’s stalling, wasting time that might not even belong to him. 

The day evades him then, and he doesn’t try to chase it. The numbness feels encompassing, and he settles into it, knowing how the routine plays out. He knows this drill, hours having spent alone inside his own head, detached from his body but not especially caring. 

His last thought with any sharpness while the sun is still peaking is how he’s grateful, at least. To not be in the passenger seat of a car, wearing the same clothes as the past three days, weighing down on the driver, not knowing where to go, what to do next. 

He still feels weighted down, though. Or the presence of something else is weighing him down. Pressure, flat urgency. The weight of the case, and it feels stitched into his skin, clammy despite the shower, cold despite the warmth of the air inside. Todd shivers, and the cold ripple through his body acts a spur, egging on his frustration and restlessness. 

Every minute spent inside feels like a waste. Every moment not spent searching for the end of events feels like a waste. Like he’s the waste, just a vessel for a headache, undeserving of the time he’s choosing not to use. His wills his body back to motion, needing something new to focus on. Leaving his room, he wonders if this is how Dirk feels. It feels rotten. 

The urgent call to motion carries him into the main room of the agency, where he finds both Dirk and Farah. They’re sitting together at the desk - Farah behind it in an office chair, Dirk perched at her side, knees up to his chest, feet tucked into the rungs of a kitchen stool. 

They’re talking theories, or Farah is and Dirk’s mulling something over, and as Todd approaches he tunes them in. 

“If time doesn’t work in that house, maybe everyone who went in is still in there,” Farah is saying. “Maybe since time passes differently they don’t even know they’re missing.” It’s an optimistic, solution-focused theory that Todd wants to grab hold of. Instead he’s thinking of that sinking feeling, the way Dirk had been so lost inside of it, sucked into the walls like it was a carnivorous plant catching flies. 

He can see Dirk lost in it now, struggling to form a response to her. From his diagonal position Todd can tell that he wants to lie and be optimistic, but can’t help it. Can see how forcing on happiness so fake and hollow it’s making his face hurt.

Farah is continuing her train of thought out loud, and Todd can gather from her theory that Dirk’s told her just enough. Just the facts, with no minor details. He’s left out the _feeling_ of being inside, being toyed with. But Todd can still feel it, can practically see it hanging around Dirk’s frame like a thick smoke.

Farah is sticking with the time, and the false images. Murmuring half to herself about tricks and illusions, and how using both might be how the house absorbs new things.

“How would birds have gotten into an underground time passage house?” Farah is still talking, letting the ideas flow out of her like water. It hits Todd then - washes over him, frigid and powerful - how she hadn’t felt it. Hadn’t been inside the house, hadn’t seen the dead look in Dirk’s eyes. Even before the red room, that dead look in his eyes, the dead tone of his voice, saying out loud how everyone who had come into the house was dead to match. 

And perhaps worse was how Todd had believed it. Believed it in a way he hadn’t believed when Dirk had done something similar back on the floor in the corner of the Cardenas house. With the voice of an unseen man echoing through the rooms towards them, and Todd had held on to his self-righteous optimism, his belief and his _need_ for there to be another option. 

There doesn’t seem to be anything else to hold on to now.

Farah keeps talking with brass authority, sketching out the plan to return like it was inevitable, obvious and easily done. A list of theories, a counter list of how to breach each theory. Step one, step two and onwards, while Todd still feels trapped behind the first door. 

Todd can feel his body reacting to the thought of going back inside the house. Muscles locking up, a flare of pain inside his joints, like his limbs were throwing down anchors. He can feel his stomach sinking too as she carries on, laying down the logic, the structure. 

“We’ll go back in more prepared,” she says, all with that decisive air, and Todd can’t swallow around the size of the words. _We’ll go back in,_ is all he hears, and turning without thinking towards Dirk, he can see that it’s hit him too. 

Dirk’s eyes have a sheen of panic in them, his breath stalled in his chest. He looks rigid to Todd, as if struck by a cold slap, and he lets out the breath he’s holding as Todd looks away. 

☞

Farah’s being careful around them. Todd is aware of this is the same distracted way he’s aware of his own limbs. She’s holding them both at a casual distance with her eyes, monitoring the atmosphere of the room the same way someone would check the gage on a thermometer. 

Todd can feel a cold sweat clinging to his back, but the blood still itching at his temples is running fever-hot. Dirk’s silence is unnerving, looping around them and spinning out into the room. 

Farah compensates with the sound of her nails rattling against the computer keys. She’s focused despite the lack of concrete facts, and beneath her composure of throwing herself into questions and solutions Todd can still see that terrible flare of panic she had been lit up with the night before. She doesn’t question his own vacant manner, understanding from those awful months trapped together what pararibulitis does to him in the hours after. 

He clings to this perception now. Hates how he’s wearing the disease like an excuse, but it’s an effective excuse, and the distance given by Farah’s caution and Dirk’s disconnect is welcomed. His state of mind feels washed out. Time doesn’t seem to be passing correctly, and he can’t separate what’s from the attacks and what’s an after effect from the house. Can’t fully separate where he is now from the house, as if he was still somewhere inside it. 

The late afternoon feels washed out too, like the day is a roll of negatives, a bleak opposite of what should be forward motion. 

Todd finds he has to look down at his feet to make sure they’re not really sinking into the floor. he feels caught ankle-deep, stationary as the sun watches him through the closed windows. 

Dirk wanders off, leaving Todd to take his place in pretending to contribute to Farah’s productivity. Todd watches Dirk leave, and tries to chime in and suggest anything helpful but he feels instantly useless without him, despite all the silence.

Todd hms and nods along with Farah’s out loud stream of consciousness for a while, but eventually runs into the same silence. Not ten minutes later and without really meaning to, Todd follows Dirk out of the room, itchy and paranoid the moment he’s out of sight, stuck feeling the soaking grime of the house walls beneath his nails. 

A painful heartbeat sits in his throat as he changes rooms, half expecting to be met with an empty room, but Dirk is just sitting at the kitchen island with a quickly cooling mug of hot water.

Todd hovers in the doorway, not saying anything. Dirk looks over to him giving it back to him tenfold. Todd hesitates, trapped between rooms, caught in the fog of the pills. He’s wondering why it feels like something is coming up behind him, and wanting for this new and strangled breed of silence to be done with them when Farah pops her head around the corner and they both jump. 

There’s a short standoff then, with everyone looking at one another. A mix of suspicion, concern, and something more frantic sits in the air, waiting to be stirred. 

It’s Farah who breaks it, stating that she’s going out - and immediately stomps out the rising flame and fear Todd has of her entering the house alone. It feels closer in his head. Just down the road, around the corner, a few houses removed. Encroaching on them.

“You really think I’m that stupid, Todd?” and he almost laughs, opts to smile a little, amending that no, he really didn’t. 

“I’m going to see if I can dig up any more background on the house that’s not online,” she fidgets with the hem of her jacket as she talks. “There’s an old city library down that way, about as old as any building in the area. If anyone has any newspapers or history on that place, that’s where it’ll be. Want to come?” 

Todd grimaces, reluctant at the thought of pouring over old files in a library basement, but stiffly willing. Willing to muster up the strength to complain throughout the process, too. A distraction sounds almost nice. Something stops him from saying yes. A pressure at his heels, something inside clinging fast, unwilling to let him leave.

He shakes his head once, jerking and final. 

Farah leaves and Todd is left dwindling. The apartment feels ancient in her absence. The empty press of infinite rooms behind his eyelids with every blink, the room that remains around him is lit gauzy in the thick sunlight. 

He suspects that Dirk is caught in the same haze, though he’s still not saying anything out loud, and Todd can’t be certain in the face of silence. 

Todd drifts away then, hoping that the feeling of his own space will lesson the strange hold the day seems to have on him. It’s not really the day’s fault, though, and he knows it. The grip around his mind and out of focus thoughts belongs solely to the house, the rooms, the red glow and smell of drying paint. 

The attack hits him like it’s been waiting on a timer the instant he walks into his room - no sanctuary to be found. As he crosses the threshold and flicks on the light, it bursts forth, as if it’s been counting down to the instant his morning pill had worn off. 

The light switch turns into an exposed socket, electricity entering his nerves from the edge of his finger, drawing a line of flame from his hand to his heart. 

A white hot surge courses out from the wall to lock in a slashing grip around his forearms. Through the pain, his mind lights up too, a frantic laugh of disbelief, a voice that sounds like dusty floorboards and broken windows.

_Told you so,_ it sings as the scent of singed hair and cooking skin enters his system. _Your mind is mine, your pain is mine, it all belongs to me_ and the bitter burning scent begins to turn into another smell. 

It comes on in an overwhelming current. 

Like his hyper sensitivity to colour, the way light and sensations turn so vibrant. It’s some automated reaction from his brain, taking shapes and shades from the real world to ground him back to reality as the attacks lesson. Regaining control, but this new scent and sensation trying to grip and ground him now felt just as hostile as the attacks could be.

The smell is heavy, leaden, earthy but without any earthly comforts.

The house smell - the basement smell, the man with the cards. The smell of the city, of the underneath. Mud and grit and gasoline.

It feels welded to his smoking skin, like it’s still with him, inside him despite his shower earlier. Something he had carried home and, giving in to exhaustion, marinated in overnight. This thought is as unpleasant as the lurking shakes of his attacks, and he feels compelled to strip the sheets he had slept on from the bed. It’s again a jarring realization that it’s not his bed and he doesn’t have the right to do so. He feels cagey, paranoid, surrounded by invisible boundaries, and by the muddy footsteps stamping them down. 

He’s got enough control left in his arms - though they still feel gripped with those snapping unseen hands - to slam the door behind him, locking himself up until it passes. 

He couldn’t say how much time passes by the time it’s left his system. The day turns around him like a zoetrope, and the attack seems loathe to truly leave. By the time the current fizzles out, he’s unsure if the skipping of his heartbeats are real or just real inside his head. 

Todd’s stomach feels sour from so many pills and not enough meals in between. He wants to forgo the next dose, just crawl back into bed, but the sun peeking curiously at him through the window says that there’s still too much day left for that. 

Todd feels appalled that it isn’t much later into the evening, closer towards midnight. He’s tired, his head still aching incessantly despite nothing of any real action occurring since he got up.

The phantom grips around his arms feel fresh, red and raw, and he can feel the spite gnashing behind his eyes and tongue again. Patience unwilling to come too near, and he doesn’t want to waste the energy on an outburst. 

Coming back into the hall is like walking into a cemetery. There’s a boiling snap inside his head - a defence mechanism from the attack? - he’s not sure, medical professionals aren’t sure, but it’s wholly present and slides into the control centre of his brain. The silence of the apartment seems set to offend him, and walking down the hall he wants to smash something onto the ground just to hear it break. 

He enters the living area to confirm what he had already suspected - Farah has yet to return, and Dirk has barely moved. 

Todd looks over to the couch where Dirk is sitting with a cushion trapped in a death grip on his lap. Dirk looks back to him, an apprehensive expression on his face. He looks hesitant to speak, like he can sense the tension, the parade of throbbing pain and senseless agitation that’s threading through Todd’s head. And Todd, with a limited supply of sympathy, doesn’t feel like explaining. His own demons are fidgeting in a line that goes out the door, loops around the block with no end in sight.

“You alright?” Todd asks in an attempt to silence them. It feels stupid to say out loud. Though there’s a distinct desire inside him for Dirk to say that _yes, of course,_ and they can both pick up the script and play normal. Maybe long enough to convince themselves that everything’s fine, and that the endless crawl of rooms isn’t so close as it feels. 

“Been worse,” Dirk says after a slow swallow of thought. Todd’s stomach drops a little at the dark honesty in his answer. He feels waterlogged. Suddenly trapped again, now in this room with Dirk. 

And watched, like there’s something with long limbs that’s descending down towards them from the ceiling. Something moving through the walls in deadly silence, and pushing the corners of the room in towards them. It’s the vibrancy turned inwards, and he should really swallow another two pills to keep in at bay. 

Todd feels two breaths away from suffocation, as close to it as the house feels close to them. It’s just down the road, a few skips away, inching closer. 

Dirk’s eyes etch around the parameter of the room while Todd tries to catch his breath, and find his reasoning. He tries counting, and loses track by watching the path of Dirk’s eyes. Scanning, scattered, crawling back to him. The pressure in Todd’s head is too much to properly calibrate anything. Was he looking for a way out? Looking for what’s causing this watching sensation? There are no simple answers waiting to be found in silence.

Todd wants to just ask him _are you okay?_ and get a real answer. Ask _are you even capable of being okay?_ but that’s a jagged underline, red ink, too much of his temper, harsh and useless, border-lining on cruel. 

The headache in his ears, behind his eyes, digging through his temples _wants_ him to be cruel, and Dirk sitting in front of him, needing him to be better. 

Todd wants to shake him, wants to reach out with both hands, grab hold and cast that frightened, unsure aura off of his shoulders. He thinks that if he had more practice, more experience being someone who wasn’t so selfish and mundane then maybe he could shake a better answer out of Dirk. 

“Sometimes I think - ” Todd cuts himself off, thinking off all the almost-times Dirk had said something. That wild look, shining out from behind his eyes, always wide and so, so bright, always cutting himself off and backing down. Turning on his heels, changing the subject, falling into abysmally dark silence. But it’s not true-dark. It’s still painted red, the vessels in his eyes, the pounding in his temples. The light from overhead, the room inside the house.

“It feels like I’m still in there,” he says instead, without really meaning to. He can see Dirk’s hands, tightening his grip. 

“Like a dream you can’t wake up from.” Dirk’s voice is quiet - or the pounding in Todd’s head is drowning him out. Todd nods, shaking the headache into a different location. It nips at his vision now.

“Walking into that room. Before the corridor with all the furniture. I - ” Todd trails off, chasing the spots in his eyes while he tries to find the words to summarize the feeling. That haunted familiarity, like deja vu but less spectral. How to explain the precursor to pararibulitis to someone who doesn’t have it. How had he faked it for so long? He shakes his head, dispelling the thought, wildly frustrated at how almost-saying something is proving to be contagious.

“It felt like walking into my room at Blackwing. It felt like - ” Dirk cuts himself off again, and Todd’s head is reeling. He’s seeing the hole in the wall that turned into a door in his mind. The postcard. His parents. Amanda. 

“Like coming home,” Todd finished. Dirk looks at him, a shine in his eyes that feels like the death of daylight. 

There’s some malformed thing on the edge of Todd’s tongue, writhing and palpating inside his mouth. Some connection between a house and a home. It’s blurring, warping images still trying to struggle behind his eyes. Post-attack brightness, but no clarity. A carnival ride of whirling thoughts and colours. Yellow paint, fly traps, feathers, birds in cages. 

Frustrated, he looks back up to Dirk, and is startled by a twin expression. Pained, twisted as he wrestles with something. Dirk’s hands are balled into white-knuckled fists at his side. Something trying to be said, both of them caught in tar-thick silence. 

It’s a silence that’s broken by the sound of the front door - opening and closing with a snapping efficiency. Farah returning, though they both still jump at the noise. 

“What are you talking about?” She asks as she enters the room.

“Nothing,” Dirk says at the same time Todd asks “find anything?” He sees Dirk look at him sharply from the side, and turns to face him. He’s looking for something, though Todd couldn’t place what, only seeing his own urge for distraction reflected back at him.

“It was originally a halfway house kind of thing,” Farah says. “A correctional facility for kids, basically. And the construction notice that’s there now - it was called off months ago. Renovation plans for that whole lot of land just cancelled, but there’s no way to trace where the cancellation order came from. Caused a bit of inner trouble at the time, but all attempts to open a dispute were also just swept away.”

“So some secret organization is trying to keep it from being torn down?” Todd asks. The hot tempered part of his brain takes a blow - new information, something pushing their smouldering train back onto the tracks. 

“Or someone is trying to keep anyone from looking into why it can’t be torn down,” Farah says. There’s a sinister element in her tone, and Dirk leans in towards her, though he looks unwilling as he moves, like something else is compelling the motion.

_“Can’t_ be torn down?” He asks, palms now pressing into the cushions by his sides, pillow in his lap forgotten.

“The site was bulldozed completely over fifty years ago,” Farah said. “The building went up another fifty odd years before that.”

“So someone rebuilt on the area?” Todd asks.

Farah hesitates, frowning as she mulls something over internally. Todd recognizes the expression. Years of structured logic grappling with the new shade of things they’ve been exposed to. Things that Dirk’s exposed them to. 

“No one seems sure on that one. There’s a bunch of documented arguments from people building on the same spot without a permit. Though no one could figure out who had built it.” She frowns again, as if disturbed by the lack of facts to draw conclusions from. Like the findings of her research had somehow offended her academically. 

“So they tore it down again,” she continues, shaking herself out of her thoughts. “The same thing happened again a few years later. Same house, same spot, no records to rebuilding to tie it to anyone.”

“Like it’s growing back,” Dirk says, a low pitch to his tone like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. 

“I’m sure there’s more to dig up about it,” Farah says, and the middle and ring fingers on her right hand are drumming out a high tempo beat against her belt. “But they closed the library for the night.” Antsy, frustrated, and Todd can relate to the annoyance but not the frequency. 

“I want to go back as soon as it opens again tomorrow,” Farah continues. She’s about a beat away from flying into her rapid-fire, self muttering state, and neither Todd nor Dirk seem eager to chime in with anything helpful. “Don’t really understand why libraries have a curfew in the first place when there are so many twenty-four hour places open that _aren’t_ sources of free information - ” 

“Right, so, tomorrow then,” Todd says. It still feels unhelpful, but Farah gives him a quick nod with so much conviction that it seems like the right thing to say. 

“I’ll round up whatever else I can find, though finding a complete history on the place is going to be almost impossible, with how much information seems to be wiped from the city’s database. Then we can go from there, and flesh out a plan. I’m not sure what else should we do. Dirk?”

“Hm?” He says, as if jostled out of a far away thought.

“What should we do?” Farah repeats, and Dirk looks at her with a wide and glossy expression. Like an animal frozen on the highway, then he blinks and it’s gone, so quickly covered to be absentminded. An almost-easy shrug. Go with the flow, with not quite enough spirit in it to have that happy-go-lucky mirage surrounding it. 

“Right. See you in the morning then,” Farah says. _She’s stamping out her own fire,_ Todd thinks dismally. With that, she’s up then, and vanished down the hall, taking the efficiency with her. The silence that falls in her wake is watered down, weak and fickle. 

“Think I’ll head to bed too,” Todd says just to shake the lingering feeling off. He has half a mind to follow her. There’s a splintered, Stockholm part of him that misses being on the road with her. Strung out in their own bubble, where gaps of silence felt strict and necessary, and not stippled with holes he felt pressed to fill. 

He doesn’t move to leave yet, like something unfinished is refusing to let him leave. 

“I’ll just stay out here tonight,” Dirk says, and looks at him again with that cautious, guarded expression. Todd watches as Dirk’s eyes slip off of him, and angle down into the apartment towards the tiny pockets of rooms that lay behind. There’s apprehension in his expression now too, like he’s daunted at the thought of walking back down the hall alone. 

Todd can already imagine the hollowness surveying him, like air pockets in underwater caves as he lies awake adjacent from Dirk’s empty room.

Then he imagines the openness of the living room, the doorways just as hollow spaces, like the gaps of lost teeth. The yawn of stairs, the front door and the street outside.

“Are you sure?” Todd asks. He’s not sure why, but the open air of the agency seems to insist it, prickling at the fine hairs at the base of his neck. 

“A little liberty goes a long way,” Dirk replies. He says it carefully, like he’s layering the words on top of something else buried underneath. 

It makes Todd think of the scent of that underneath, the house-mask, that living, dirty smell of it. How it had spread from the air to his skin, from his clothes to the bed they had slept on together. Dirk’s refusal to cover that black line of hall to sleep in it again makes more than enough sense to him. 

The edge of the attacks swim around Todd in lazy circles, looking for a way in. He makes a mental note to take another pill before it breaks the ring and gets to him again. The note is a tally mark on everything Farah’s been writing down. A list of things that should be done, things that should be tended too, and the later the night stretches the longer the list feels, until it’s unravelling so far into the distance that he feels sick and exhausted just thinking about it. 

Farah’s voice, stable in tone if nothing else, asking what’s next. _What should we do?_

“Get some sleep,” Todd answers, to himself but spoken out into the darkening room. He edges himself away from the couch, and backs towards the hall. The contents of his chest cavity feel shredded. A vacuous hole of pulled-pork organs.

He feels bad. Hot bile kind of bad, and he wants to reach out and cradle the feeling. He wants to address the wrongness inside him, this burnt out urge to not leave Dirk alone in the swell of the shadows and gaps of doors. 

But Dirk has already curled inwards, inched onto his side again, cheek pressed against the opposite arm of the couch.

“Thank you, Todd,” he says, more gone than present, and the bile spreads from Todd’s throat to his tongue, tainting it and stopping any words from forming. 

Just past the living room, the streetlamp outside the kitchen window flicks on, then keeps on flickering. Yellow light coating his skin until he feels yellow too. A coward standing in a doorway, unsure of what he should be doing, only knowing that he isn’t doing it. Might not be capable at all. 

He’s got some twisted cousin of the same feeling he had had days previously. That gut-feeling urge to not leave Dirk alone so close to the door, the outside world. This time there’s no worry that he’ll slink off alone, though. Todd’s got some other feeling, begging him to place himself between Dirk and the door and the coil of streets behind it. 

But there’s nothing he can interpret to tether himself to the feeling. Either the hour or the strain of tired aching in his head is begging him to just go to bed and be done with the day, and he lets this tactile urge steer his movements. 

Leaving Dirk in the darkness is a pressure to match the one in his head, and he heads into the bathroom where the artificial light is bright enough to hurt. 

☞

He’s half asleep, brushing his teeth and not making eye contact with the aggression of his reflection when he reaches back with the bristles to run over his molars and the head off his toothbrush pierces through the inside of his cheek, jutting out just below his cheekbone.

He makes a choking sound, swallowing a mouthful of toothpaste and water. He can feel the blunt edge of the brush, the soft tearing of the tissue, the menthol stink on all sides of the new hole, and the feeling chasing the initial wave of pain is just pure frustration.

_Not this shit again,_ and he drops his hold on the brush, distantly hearing the real one clatter into the sink, and feeling the pressure where the one protruding from his face hangs now. Reaching out with both hands he grips the basin of the sink. The cold bite of the porcelain sinks in, and it’s not enough to be relief but it’s a distraction, and so is the feeling of his knuckles locked out and tendons straining to break out from behind his skin. 

He tries the tricks, deep breaths and upward counting. He can feel his heartbeat in his throat, a wet percussion alongside the screaming nerves in his face. Leaning forward he spits a frothy gob of pink foam into the sink and more droplets follow, cherry red and not really there.

His mind isn’t quite there either. Not pumped with adrenaline and screaming in the moment like he sometimes is, was more so with those first attacks, so fresh and ripping on his psyche. Instead he just feels wretched and worn, angry and waiting for it to be over, sucking air in from the hole in his face, cold and minty and singed with an iron taste. 

He walks back down the hall and into the kitchen with the composure of a drunk man, dripping unseen spatters of blood onto the linoleum. Caught up in the hallucination, he forgets temporarily that he had moved his stash to his bedroom for this very reason. 

Gathering his balance to turn without slipping on not-there blood, he freezes, spotted vision catching hold of the far wall of the kitchen. 

There’s a figure there, backlit by the artificial glow of the straining street lamp outside.

At first Todd thinks it’s something his mind has projected, placing demons in the corner now, some new level his disease has unlocked just for him, new external forces more powerful than imaged inanimate objects.

But the figure startles as it sees him, flinching with a guilty spin, and Todd sees that it’s just Dirk, angled to stare out at the street below. 

He can feel the frontlines of his mind pacing, all stamping feet and apprehension. Temper high, patience low from the need to do something, the not knowing of what. That red irrational part of his brain is trying to direct his anger at Dirk’s shape in the dark - _pretending to be asleep so you’d leave the room_ \- but the direction misfires, and twists around to strike out at himself. 

“Sorry,” Dirk says meekly, like he’s entered some restricted area, out of bed and out of bounds. 

“Too many thoughts in my head,” he adds, an explanation that Todd hadn’t asked for. In fact he feels like he’s the one intruding. The light outside flickers, violently this time, and the glow sinks into the kitchen like the sweeping pass of a lighthouse beam. The circles under Dirk’s eyes look darker in the shadows, tired and tepid.

Along with the light, Todd feels a jolt of empathy with Dirk’s fast apology, and it’s distraction enough for the hole in his face to pull itself closed. The growing hole in the pit of his stomach remains. He tries to fill it with something other than the rippling wave of impatience and burning, tries to fight for more of his will to return to him. It feels all used up. From willing the hole in his face that isn’t there to close up, willing the house that isn’t there to back away from the fragile defence of his mind.

In the wake of Dirk’s stalled silence, Todd’s hit with another wave of needing to do something. Say something, but he’s left with an empty well to draw from. Scraps of sympathy, and it’s not enough. Todd falling short again, drawing empty. 

“Right,” he says in place of anything else, and it comes out sounding hot tempered and impatient, like he’s waiting for something more. 

“I just - ” Dirk falters, eyes washing over Todd much like the light outside had, vast and searching. “Just haven’t been sleeping well,” he finishes. It sounds halfhearted, like a half-truth made to cover something held deeper. Todd feels like he’s done nothing but sleep and snap since their return. He wants to crawl back into that feeling now, evade the house, his own temper, but again there seems to be something else holding him in place.

“It’s like that, usually, sometimes, when I’m on a case,” Dirk says, starting up again when Todd doesn’t move, or say anything back. “Days all start running together, you know?” 

Another stinging sheet of pain courses through Todd’s face like an aftershock and he makes a sound that seems to be interpreted as agreement.

“And then last night - and maybe that’s just the emotional exhaustion - was the best sleep I’d had in, well, weeks maybe, but I couldn’t _stay_ once I had woken up, seeing you still there, and I had thought it was a dream again, like maybe I was still in that house, but you were there and sometimes I just want to - ” another lurch into silence. 

That wild look is back and bright as ever, and Todd has nothing left to draw from. Instead, he looks at Dirk’s face, the wide, wild, bright, deeply silent eyes, and all he feels is the hole in his face like it’s still freshly seeping, and that raw, seething anger. Spiking out of him, hot and sharp, like a bloody pulse. Fire, lashing, frustrated rage. It doesn’t belong to him, it belongs to the attacks, to the house, but he’s powerless to control the flare now, burning him on its way out. 

“Just want to _what,_ Dirk?” Hot coals on his tongue, the pounding beat in his temples, the ghost of the last dose of pills, demanding to be fed again. Dirk’s shaking his head now, dispelling tears from the wild part as he does. Crystalline. 

“Finish your sentence, so I can go to bed,” Todd snaps, sighs. “Just want to _what._ ” He’s hardly heard Dirk’s last sentences, let alone processed them. The fire, the spike, has turned into a high boil in his stomach, his chest, anywhere it can churn and bubble over. He can feel the burns on the inside of his skin, on the bite of his words.

“Just want to kiss you,” Dirk answers, terribly small, like the words are scraping on the way out. He’s apologizing then, sizing himself down and turning to leave, to flee the scene, out of the room and down the hall. 

The vibrant, blurring, carnival bit of Todd’s mind kicks up the projection then, like his thoughts have fully left his body.

Almost in third person he can see his own attitude flaring out and striking anyone near him. Dirk’s flares of retaliation, whip-fast and almost instantly replaced with regret. Turning away, twisting to leave, never expecting anyone to follow. Dirk folding down the corners of himself to fit the room better.

This time the angry spike inside Todd bristles, carves inwards. Another headache-tempered blow, but this one sinks into himself, cutting deep and lodging in some soft inner cavity. With this new pain, he forcibly shoves his control back into his body. 

Todd doesn’t move to let him pass.

Instead he stands locked in place and thinks of all the times they’ve argued. How all the arguments, the big ones, the stupid ones, how they’ve all been some muddy version of the two.  
Every time Dirk says something he means, _really_ means, no matter how blunt or honest or unsavoury, he had turned to leave, started to leave, left entirely sometimes. 

Leaving a jagged tear in the conversation and the atmosphere around them. An uneven opening leaving just enough room for Todd to call after him. A shout, a receding, an apology, an excuse, and the result was the same every time. How Dirk would turn, how his expression would be so shocked and hurt but hopeful too, so disbelieving. Todd had always interpreted that as shock at an apology, from someone so low and mealy like him, for someone like him to own up and try to be better.

But maybe it was shock and disbelief that he had said _anything_ , and that he kept saying anything instead of turning away too.

And the realization that, in this moment - and in between everything Dirk had said by not saying anything - that no one had ever called after him. To apologize, to recede. 

Always alone - how he had described every event before. Moving from that - swiftly as a bird’s dive from a great height, or a person from a bridge - from that to asking Todd if he would stay.  
And he hadn’t meant for the night, the implications of a shared bed, innocent in company after horrors faced alone. But to _stay._ For longer than a night, a case, an argument. But stay through it, the bad times, the big and stupid. The endless rooms. 

Forever maybe.

Forever like the coursing sprawl above Amanda’s head. The holes threatening to spoil the canvas.

“That’s alright,” Todd manages to get out before Dirk - folded even smaller now, almost not existing - squeezes through the gap between him and the frame of the door. Dirk freezes, gives the expression on Todd’s face a calculated going over, though Todd couldn’t say for certain what emotions it was displaying. 

“Is it?” Dirk asks.

In the quiet of the room, the darkness is only interrupted by the flicker of the streetlamp, casting in uneven streaks across Dirk’s back, spreading like ragged wings. 

The silence spreads between them, extending until Todd can’t tell if he’s asked it for him to answer, or meant it for himself, low and debating. 

“It’s alright,” Todd says again, and the sureness in his voice surprises him. The hour, the   
the feeling that the house is right outside now, that opening the door of the agency would open the front door to it, leading straight into that red glow, hungry and happening. 

“It’s all alright,” he says, quieter now, and Dirk stands in front of him, looking at him with a silent desperation in his eyes that tells him he doesn’t believe any of it. 

In the hour, the strange uneven light, Todd can see Dirk’s pulse, rabbit-fast against his throat. Can hear his own heart, pounding blood into his temples. Can hear them syncing up, speeding up, turning into a hollow rapid knocking, knocking against the door outside, the doors inside himself, something terrible demanding they open up and let it in. 

Searchlight vacant, Dirk’s eyes press towards him through the room and the gap of space between them. He’s folded up, a paper doll shaped shadow, and the space between them isn’t large enough to let him by. The knocking sounds like a battering ram now.

There’s no doubt in Todd’s mind that he hears it too, and the walls and beams all seem to shake under the pressure of it. The ceiling feels ready to collapse onto them, bury them both in a mess of rubble. 

_What now?_ It asks, heaving from above. 

There’s no answer made to fit the noise. Only the stretching black of the hallway behind them, and the amber flicker of the streetlight.


	11. The Plan To Dive Back In

The next morning starts the same as the last, held in the shroud of a false awakening. Todd’s eyes don’t want to fully open, glued in the creases of the shadowy dreams he doesn’t want to focus on. Through the haze of waking he thinks it might be a chance to do it over, either that or it’s a punishment to live through it all again.

His temper feels gone, but drawn back like the tide with the promise of another wave. An inevitable current, always carrying him back to that negative space, and when he chokes on his morning dose it feels deserved. 

☞

Farah and Dirk sit together in front of the agency desk with their heads low - Dirk’s contemplative, Farah’s conspiring. 

When Todd walks into the room Dirk’s head pivots automatically to look at him, birdlike and chasing the new motion. There’s an expression on his face that Todd can’t quite place - maybe embarrassed - and Todd doesn’t know what to do about the holes in the universe, the holes Dirk’s burning with his eyes, the holes in the pit of his stomach. 

“Morning Todd,” Farah says, and includes him in her continued speaking. “When you were separated, you’d been standing directly beside each other, right?” Todd nods. He can feel his right side prickle in memory. Feeling the heat and fear licking off of Dirk’s body, then feeling the cold, empty air of the house take its place. 

“So my theory is that you weren’t actually taken into a different part of the house, but rather just stopped being visible, or perceived. If it could trick you into seeing things that weren’t there, why couldn’t it trick you into not-seeing things that _were_ there, make sense?” Todd shrugs while Dirk nods numbly. In the haze of the pills and warped wake of attacks, anything could make sense, and none of it really did anymore. Reality felt made of rubber, malleable and rather pointless. 

Todd had told Farah about the tunnel - though he barely remembers what exactly he had told her - and as she worked through her notes and thinking out loud, he found that she had structured her plan around it.

She gets Todd caught up while he mills out to the kitchen and helps himself to a mug of still-hot coffee stewing in the pot. Her theory was straightforward enough - that the house would have to lead people into a specific part of it to trap them - they would have to go into it, and it couldn’t materialize something that wasn’t there _around_ them.

“As real as it may have felt, you didn’t bring anything back out with you,” she states while Todd comes back to join them. She’s on roll now, and pivots in her chair to face Dirk. 

“How did you end up inside the walls, exactly?” Dirk stares at her for a moment, open mouthed like he’s shocked and unprepared to be a part of her presentation. Then he blinks, swallows, and Todd’s expecting some non answer. _Can’t remember,_ or the like. 

“I... went into it,” Dirk says instead, surprising Todd, and Farah slaps the table lightly. A celebration for another point in her theory’s favour. 

“My best guess is it’s all illusion based,” Farah says, and Todd frowns around a mouthful of coffee. _Delusion, more like,_ he thinks, and again the image of a carnivorous plant enters his mind. Fly traps, angler fish, twists and turns and funhouse mirrors. 

“I’ll do another sweep of the library, but that matches up with those other accounts of people seeing things that couldn’t be real,” Farah says, and smoothly tears a page out of the notebook on the desk. “Think you two can manage picking some things up?” 

“Sure,” Todd says, mostly conscious. He’s eager at the chance to do something useless. Happy to sit up and beg for it. Farah shoots him an appreciative smile, and he accepts it like a pat on the head. 

“Perfect. I’ll be back this evening, if I find anything useful we’ll add that to what we’ve got and we can tweak the plan from there. Sound good?”

“Sounds great,” Dirk says, and the delivery is so good that Todd almost believes him. Nothing about it sounded good to him. From his perspective, the best case scenario from her findings just brought them one step closer to returning to the house. Diving back in with no real certainty of how or if they’ll be getting back out again. 

Farah’s up then, and out through the front door in a flash. 

“She’s already got steps one through ten figured out,” Dirk says, sounding somewhere between impressed and concussed. “Can’t help but admire her craft, though I’m not sure she quite grasps the method of lounging about and waiting for impulse to strike.”

“I think she _is_ the impulse that strikes,” Todd says, watching Farah’s car pull out from the front of the building. “Best defence is a good offence and all.” 

“I thought that was referring to sports,” Dirk says, looking out the window as well, and now sounding more than a little overwhelmed. 

“I have a suspicion that Farah looks at everything a bit like sports. Winning or losing, at least,” Todd says. Dirk looks mildly baffled at the concept and Todd drops it. 

“Whatever. Anyway, head out in twenty?” Todd says. Dirk is giving the paper Farah had torn out a once over, and looks up to nod an affirmation.

It’s enough time for Todd to fix himself something for breakfast and get his mind in the game in the process. 

Propped up in the breakfast nook on one of the agency’s high bar stools it takes more effort than usual to force food down. It’s all too easy to dwell on the house. It sits tall inside of him, demanding to be acknowledged. Demanding that he process their return to it. If they had truly left it at all. 

He doesn’t mean to keep returning to that notion. But his thoughts seem to enjoy pressing at it, like fingers sinking into a bruise. He can still smell the paint cooking overhead, feel the grit and ooze jellifying on Dirk’s skin. 

It’s the memory of the walls that kills his appetite - the wet and pliant give to it, sighing inwards like pressed organs. The bread in his mouth turns to drywall and sawdust. 

He shakes himself back into the moment. Swallowing hard, he rises, his body keen to move despite its aches, and he comes back to the desk in the front area, seeking out the grounding realness of Farah’s instructions. 

The page was as concise as he could have imagined - a list of products followed by a column of stores and addresses, and smaller writing tucked into the margin of reviews.

It’s good to have a goal, and Todd pours as much energy he can muster into the do to list. Rolling out a few pops in his shoulder that resent the action, he kicks his shoes on and goes for the key hook near the door. The car keys aren’t there. 

It’s not at all shocking, and Todd barely sighs at the empty hook, turning on his heel to find Dirk - he had a knack for wandering over to a random cupboard or couch cushion and suddenly manifesting the missing object. 

_“It’s not a ‘psychic thing,’ I’m just a bit...subconsciously observant,”_ he had explained rather defensively when Todd had pointed it out.

While crossing the length of the hall to Dirk’s room he thinks for a moment that he’s spied a layer of fine dust coating the wall. Then he blinks, adjusting to the lighting, and sees that it’s nothing more than the sunlight colouring the cream paint. 

He can see Dirk through the doorway pacing the length of his room, and Todd momentarily forgets what he’s doing there. 

Dirk’s not entirely pacing without purpose, and stops to retrieve a pillow from the floor, and places it back on his bed, smoothing the covers over with his hands, making it neat. 

_He hadn’t slept in it, though,_ Todd’s reminded. 

“So how’d you sleep?” He asks when Dirk’s eyes flick over towards him, registering his presence in his doorway. The level of his stare has Todd feeling awkward beneath it, like he’s on the other side of a one night stand with nothing to show for it. 

Even Dirk’s clothes seemed nervous, strewn across the floor, edging towards the door, as if uncertain whether or not they should leave.

“Fine,” Dirk says quickly, then seems to read a cloud of tension in Todd’s face with the word. “Not great,” he amends. “Better, marginally, maybe.” 

It’s an admission Todd isn’t sure what to do with, as unsure as he is on why he’s standing so strangely in Dirk’s doorway, like he’s waiting for permission to enter. _Keys_ his mind prompts, and he clears his throat quickly. 

“Car keys!” He says, and Dirk quirks his head at the oddness in his tone. “No idea where they are, but we should head out,” he carries on, wondering whether or not he’s saved himself. 

“I haven’t driven in over a week, I haven’t the faintest idea,” Dirk says, chucking a pillow back onto the floor. It’s a dramatic act of defiance which Todd ignores. 

“Just, do your thing, and we’re good to go,” he says, spreading his fingers and wriggling them outwards into the room like feelers. 

“What is that?” Dirk complains, mimicking the motion of Todd’s hands. “Stop that, I hate it.”

“Fine,” he huffs after a temporary standoff with Todd’s expectant stare. “But if I find them somewhere you could have taken two seconds to check first, I’m going to be very put out.” 

“Still saves two seconds,” Todd replies, following Dirk as he wandered in a meandering zigzag from his room to Todd’s. 

“Pocket of your jacket, any chance?” Dirk says, toeing pointedly at the small mound of clothes accumulating at the foot of his bed. 

“Haven’t checked,” Todd says easily, and Dirk shoots him a withering glare. 

“Also you really shouldn’t leave this out, Farah will evict you if we get flies again,” Dirk adds, plucking a half-full cooler can from Todd’s nightstand. A set of keys clang onto the ground in the process. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dirk mutters darkly, and Todd does a terrible job of stifling a laugh. He gets a rather savage glare from Dirk in return, and in the moment, everything is fine. Golden daylight kicking despair to the curb in a lick of small victory. 

“This wasn’t me being anything, this was you being predictably unkempt,” Dirk seethes and Todd’s laugh carries them down the stairs. 

Out of the apartment and out of the house in their heads. 

☞

They slide through Farah’s list with that same golden feeling chasing their heels. The air outside is open, easy, and falling into the pattern of running errands and stopping at red lights sinks into Todd’s skin like a welcomed delusion. 

_Fine,_ Todd’s mind insists. Presses it like a pill, edging towards the back of his throat. 

Walking side by side with Dirk not in some hellish labyrinth but in a sporting goods store, with bright lights and powerfully mundane displays that warping images and secret trails couldn’t possibly infiltrate. 

_Everything’s fine._ It flows like a trembling undercurrent, an unspoken wave of desperation within him, needing it to be true. 

And when they return to the agency it’s with a set of rock climbing rope and harnesses, a thick coil of cable, and a crank operated pulley system. 

Farah returns a while after they do, offering Dirk a stack of photocopied papers which he barely seems to skim. Todd retrieves them gingerly and scans them over while Farah joins them in the living area. It’s more of the same. Recounts of monsters, loved ones back from the grave, visions of hell. 

“Find everything?” Farah asks once they’re all sitting together. 

“We’re actually _very_ capable when we put our heads together, thanks,” Dirk says, nodding the haul they’d brought back. 

“Sure!” She agrees brightly. “Combined you’ve got almost one functioning brain. It’s very impressive.” 

“Screw off,” Todd’s scoffing at her, and the thin line of that golden feeling spools around her too. 

_Thank you,_ he’s saying silently. _God knows how lost we’d be without you._ It’s a winding thought that extends, braiding with the feeling of the afternoon. 

And then further outward, a vine of his mind reaching for Amanda, wondering where she’s gotten to now. What perils she’s uncovered, what cosmic truths. 

It’s an ache that goes beyond the stiffness of his body, and a yearning at the not-knowing. Todd feels small in that moment, swept out somewhere by a bigger thought. It always sweeps him out when he stops and dwells on it for too long. Amanda’s place in the universe, his place, that creeping feeling that he’s in it, that something’s coming now that they’re all lined up. 

There’s nothing to be done but let the thought come too. They would sweep and swim and carry around them - all the bigger things. They swirl around and above him now, like whales beneath churning waves. 

Todd feels distant from his body while Farah runs down her idea. 

He doesn’t feel equip to offer changes or alternate ideas. Some corner of his brain doesn’t drag him down for this either - some smooth, deep in-there pitch that battles against that useless feeling. It’s the same one that suggests that this is his role, his position. 

His mind feels weightless, bobbing a few feet or miles above them in the room, but he listens to Farah, nods along to the steps of her plan. 

Dirk and Todd strapped in to the harnesses, affixed to each other, and in turn to the thick cable, running back out to the car. Farah at the other line of the cable, ready with the motor. 

One tug from their end means danger. Two to keep going.

And she would stay with the car to turn the crank, feed them more line, and activate the engine to reel the whole thing back out. Back out to her and the car and the real world. 

☞

“Alright?” Farah asks. Evening checks, rounding up the troops. _She’s so calm before we jump in to something,_ Todd thinks. _Composure first, hurricane second._ It’s late. The afternoon having picked up speed, the evening breaking into a run. And still running now, like time is a sentient beast, moving around them rather than them through it. 

“Yeah, I think so,” Todd says distantly. It comes with a sway that she reaches out to. Places a hand on his shoulder and steadies the boat. It convinces him that he’s still there, still present in the room. 

“And Dirk?” It’s part of their new routine, teaming up to discuss how they’re holding up. It feels to Todd both invasive and something they should have been doing from the start. 

“I’m not sure,” Todd replies. “Something feels...different this time. Maybe I feel different.” 

Farah’s eyes, soaking up the light from the windows, reflect back at him with a depth that he can’t fully process.

“Don’t worry,” Todd says, and almost laughs at Farah’s expression. _Not really an option,_ it reminds. “I’ll talk to him,” he adds. 

☞  
Todd doesn’t find him in the kitchen this time or back in his room, though he wasn’t really expecting to. He chases the night back down the hall out into the openness of the agency’s main room. There Dirk is pacing small paths into the floor. 

“Hey,” Todd says, careful not to startle him as he came into the room. But Dirk merely glances over at his direction. He looks at him somewhat expectantly, and Todd gets the feeling that he’s been bracing for this. 

“Ready for tomorrow?”

“That is a very big, quintessentially human question,” Dirk replies. It’s not an answer, but it is all the same. 

“Right,” Todd says, pulling a face at the evasion. “It feels insane that we’re just...gearing up and jumping back in already. Possibly more insane than every other time.”

Dirk let out a deep breath, a whoosh of despairing understanding. 

“It feels like there’s just so many magnets. Dragging me towards things,” Dirk says. His hands are caught in absentminded motion around the hem of his shirt, twisting it around a finger. Todd watches, getting dizzy in the movement, waiting for Dirk to continue. 

“Todd, I can’t promise that I’ll be able to get out of it. Get you out of it. If I get pulled towards something that’s stronger than me, I - ” His fingers keep twisting, winding the fabric tighter and tighter.

Todd feels distantly frustrated, his brain still trying to squeeze pieces of the past few days out of his mind, and his own stubbornness clinging to those same pieces. He can feel the edges of the shards, biting into him on the inside, and he clings tighter.

“You focus on getting in. Me and Farah can worry about getting us out,” he says, fighting off a crawling urge to pull Dirk’s hands away from himself and still the nervous motion. “You’ve dragged me into your fair share of messes. I think it’s only fair that we drag you out of this one.” 

“I’m the centre of so much chaos. It shouldn’t be up to you to deal with the consequences,” Dirk says disparagingly. 

“I don’t accept that,” Todd says simply, and drags himself higher up to look Dirk in the eye. 

“When you met me I was a shallow, pessimistic asshole - ” he jerks a finger into the air to silence Dirk when he tries to argue. “And I know how you feel about that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I _was_ an asshole. I didn’t believe in anything. You, me, humanity, the universe, nothing.” Dirk’s eyes are watching the space between them carefully, hands still now, but the itch to reach for them remains. 

“You had to convince me of everything. You had to persist and push and it drove me fucking crazy... but it was what I needed, and I’m grateful for it. I’m better for it.” 

“You took a risk on me because you didn’t have anything else to go on. So now I’m asking you to do that again. Count on me, Dirk. Even if you don’t know the outcome, alright?” Dirk doesn’t answer, but lets out a low breath, and Todd takes it as a win. 

“If you get us in, then I’ll get us back out.” He says it like a mantra as the last rope of sunlight caught on the horizon lingers and then dips away. A bolt of deep orange stains in through the window, then the floor, and bows out as nightfall stretches lean around them. Whatever was lighting the fire of dirk fighting him on that seems to go out with it. 

“I do count on you,” Dirk says. It’s amending, with a texture of guilt to it that Todd wants to fight.

“I’m sorry for being like this,” Dirk says next.

“How else would you be?” Todd says it softer, as if the presence of the night, so fresh and cool in the air demands a lower tone. 

“I don’t know,” Dirk admits with an almost-smile. _Someone better,_ Todd interprets, or maybe just imposes. It’s what he feels - has been feeling, and suspects will carry on feeling. He doesn’t voice it, though, just keeps it inside to chew on.

“Every other time I’ve gotten mixed into something horrible, I’ve never had someone else who had to deal with it too,” Dirk says jerkily. Todd can sense an incoming onslaught of words, the first few creaks and drips before the water starts really running. 

“I just don’t know what to do with myself. Usually I just run away from everything.” Todd doesn’t try to interject and stop the faucet. It feels like a necessity, like bloodletting maybe. 

_How many detectives does it take to outrun a house?_ Todd’s mind supplies in place of an interruption. It feels like the setup to a bad joke, and Todd can’t anticipate the punchline. 

“...and now i keep waking up and I’m _here,_ but am I? Are we? What if - ” then Dirk’s shutting his mouth, shaking his head, but Todd can hear his next words as clearly as if he’d spoken them. It’s the same thought that’s been eating away at him since they had first crossed that threshold. 

_What if we’re still in the house?_ It echoes through the forefront of his mind, amplified by one of Farah’s questions - _what if they don’t know they’re missing?_ This thought it then drowned out by the other one. The bigger one, some instinct from inside a dark corner. That terrible nagging feeling that they’re on the path they should be, right on time. 

“You’re here,” Todd says, and there’s so much grit in his tone that he’s startled to find he believes it, deeply and darkly. “You’re right here, and we’re going to come back from that house. This time tomorrow night, we’ll be right back here again.” 

Dirk looks unconvinced still, and something inside Todd rears up and sends him forwards, locking his fingers around Dirk’s forearms and holding tight. 

“Dirk - we will. I know we will.” 

“You _don’t_ know that,” Dirk says back. It’s a hotblooded hiss, like Todd is squeezing the words out through his wrists, locked in a tight grip. 

“Too bad, because I believe it.” It’s a spattering of comfort. An embroidered patch of defiant faith struggling to cover the hole torn in the fabric of Dirk’s defences. Worn down from the stretches of sleep that were ignored or interrupted by more thoughts. By wet paint and knocking. 

“I’ll stay with you,” Todd says, and by Dirk’s uncertain expression knows it’s not enough. “Tonight,” he adds. 

Dirk’s eyes are wide, widening still, and Todd thinks a bit deliriously that if they widen any more they’ll take over his face. He can almost see the exaggeration in his mind like a psychedelic vision plastered over his reality. He wonders briefly if there’s a chance that he’s been drugged, or if it’s some after effect of the house, or so many attacks. Acting like hallucinogens spreading from his thoughts into his skin, reabsorbing and keeping him trapped in a delusion.

“If you want me to,” he throws in. It feels a beat too late. 

☞

Laying together in Dirk’s bed feels different this time. No longer riding the terrible high of escaping the house, there’s less of an excuse to it, and the buzz in Todd’s head that this is out of want and not need grates like electrical interference. A steady chatter that feels much too present, and at the same time easy to ignore. 

Dirk doesn’t mention what had happened in the kitchen the previous night, and Todd doesn’t either. Doesn’t know where to begin, though he suspects it should be with an apology. 

It’s this new terror insisting they not talk about it that creates an in for the other things they were avoiding. The red room, the way Farah brandished the return like it was straightforward and not just an inevitable doom. 

“I guess it’s not an option to just, I don’t know, not go,” Todd says, and Dirk scoffs. Almost a joke, and almost a laugh, and it’s almost enough. 

“I don’t think it would let us,” Dirk replies, and Todd sighs, amending that that’s exactly what he figured. What he’s not sure is what the _it_ really is. The house, the universe, the driving force to whatever it is that keeps pulling Dirk. 

“As much as I want to turn and run from this thing - and believe me I’ve tried - ” the casting light of the moon, the shadows laying in ruins on Dirk’s face, and Todd believes, truly believes, that he’s been doing nothing but running for most of his life. 

“I can’t back down from whatever it is that’s pulling me towards it.” There’s another lull of silence, words and quiet rushing in and tugging out like tides, the moon breathing through the window, wrapping them in pale strength.

“I wish I could explain it, even just understand what it meant. But it’s a pull, and I can’t ignore it,” Dirk picks up again. His eyes are half closed, pointed down, but Todd feels the bore of his words, the heat of his eyes as if they’re burning into his own. 

“Maybe I’m supposed to. Maybe I’m just weak and give in to every impulse that the universe throws my way, and some of them are tests and I’m not - ”

“But it wasn’t thrown your way,” Todd butts in, suddenly angry. He’s angry at the impulse-thrower, the situations that coil like spiked wire around Dirk, around them both. “This didn’t come find you, you found it. This came from _you_. You’ve got the power to find these things that no one else can, you’re not giving yourself enough credit to say that you’re just the - I don’t know - vessel.”

Through the moonlight, Dirk looks like the antithesis of power. Head hung low, knees drawn in to his chest, eyes scattered, distant as stars, clinging to the floorboards.

“I don’t feel powerful, Todd. I just feel afraid.” There’s enough silence for Todd to fall into, so he does. And then, through the pit of it, “I don’t want to be afraid anymore.” 

“It’s got to be leading to something,” Todd presses, and he tries to swallow the desperation before it stains into his words.

“Well, it led me to you,” Dirk says. He says it quietly, a hush inside the room that Todd has to press closer to catch. 

“That’s... got to count for something,” Todd says after a pause. An inner battle against saying something different, putting himself down and backing away from any goodness that he could be adding. _That’s not my line. That’s not what anyone needs to hear._

Todd’s flat attempts to comfort disappear into space. The moon, the darkness, the gap between them on the mattress, and Todd’s head is spinning, reaching out to hold onto something. 

_The kitchen_ the ink-black pit of his mind offers. The knocking - coming from inside the house, coming from inside his head, beating outwards from Dirk’s pulse. 

How Dirk had disappeared inside the house, had tried to disappear from the kitchen, tried to fold himself down, and how he’s so much more unfolded now. Todd doesn’t want to go back to that. The house, the kitchen, and he sifts through the haze in his mind for anything else to talk about. But the thoughts persist.

“You said you went into it, in the house. Why?” Todd asks, and Dirk looks confused for a moment, then his eyes cloud over in understanding. 

The shuddering disconnect nips at Todd, bringing back his own feelings of revulsion at the sight of the tunnel that had appeared in his room. The conjured up image of Dirk, insisting that’s the way to go. Had there been some aspect of the real Dirk in that? Encouraging him to go into it? All Todd had felt was the wet stain of darkness, evolution and survivalism all insisting that he stay away from it.

“They told me to,” Dirk finally replies, and it’s not an answer but a door, opening between them. And waiting on the other side was the glowing stretch of red light, and whatever it was that Dirk had seen that had left him in the walls. 

“Blackwing,” he mutters next, and his words are red in contrast.

“Of course,” Todd says, and doesn’t mean for it to sound chastising. 

“It’s always Blackwing,” Dirk snaps, desperate and pleading despite the ferocity. “You don’t know what it was like, I wouldn’t _want_ you to know what it’s like - ”

“What did they do to you in there?” Todd cuts in, regretting the question before it’s even left his tongue. It’s the stain of his nature, of human nature maybe. Age-old curiosity, and the selfish cruelty of it. Families and freakshows.

“They... _contained_ us,” Dirk replies. Todd can see the rise of fall of his chest with each breath, and hates the rehearsed diplomacy of his answer. Todd doesn’t want to press him for a detailed explanation - for Dirk to even bring up Blackwing on his own volition was a miracle. Todd stays silent, his head geared towards overthinking despite the fog of pills billowing around his thoughts. He’s second guessing his own position now, back towards the door, facing Dirk head on and hoping it doesn’t seem like an attack. 

Dirk is watchful through the dark, and seems to conclude that Todd isn’t going to ask for anything else. He takes a preparing breath, and Todd only realizes then that he’s been holding his own. 

“They took me in when I was little, kept me under constant surveillance. Locked in a room, cameras _everywhere,_ just - ” he draws back and sighs again, and Todd wants to close in and pull it from him. Just wordlessly absorb it for the sake of knowing, and save Dirk the trouble of walking him through it. 

“On the good days it was just very prison-like, only for lab rats more than for people. Your whole life on a schedule you can’t control...not that it’s really that different from how I can’t control anything out here either,” Dirk adds, and if it’s a play for humour Todd doesn’t catch it. 

“It was all just - ” a shiver runs through Dirk, and they’re close enough on the bed that Todd feels it too - “examinations, and experiments, and tests...”

“I think someone higher up wouldn’t let them kill us, so they dissected us in every other way they could think of. They seemed to shift things up this last time. A new director keeping things fresh, I suppose. They’d strap me to these machines, and I’d get shocked with every wrong answer - that was new. They were still ALL wrong answers, though, every time ... I can’t whip it out like a parlour trick - ”

“I know that,” Todd says, and Dirk gives him a look.

_“Now,”_ he says pointedly. “Even you wanted to quiz me on it.” Todd flinches a little, remembering his own eagerness. 

It had felt like a game at the time, a lifetime ago, sitting across from Dirk at a diner, after being strung along behind Dirk on a wild goose chase Todd could make no sense of. 

Finally his turn to come up with something new and fun, and how easily he had tuned out Dirk’s reaction - again, that disconnect. 

Dirk’s leaving things out, Todd’s sure of it. Leaving things out the same way he’s left things out, the same way everyone ends up leaving so many things inside. Shielding the other from seeing the worst of themselves. 

They’re not things someone can ask to see, and Todd knows it, knows it the same way he knows that if he were to reach out and take Dirk’s hand now, he would let him. He’s thinking about it, the reach, the distance between them, thinking that if he just had Farah’s bravery, Dirk’s drive, but he barely has his own thoughts wound together.

Then Dirk sighs, dispelling some of the tension from between them as he does.

“I know I’ve been a pain lately - ” 

“You’ve always been a pain,” Todd cuts in, happy for the disruption of the fog, and it chisels a smile out of Dirk, who continues. 

“It’s my own fault. At night I’ve been - since before we even found the house I’ve been having bad dreams. More than usual, anyway.”

This flashes Todd back to the days before. To Dirk’s spiking energy, manic ramblings, darting all over the place, and how those spikes would quickly wheel into pits of silence and lethargy. It was a whirlwind, impossible to interpret from the outside. He stays quiet, giving Dirk the space to continue, not wanting to cut him off from sharing something after so much silence from both ends. 

“It was like some other part knew what we were getting close to. Sometimes it’s just easier to not sleep than to deal with them. The we got into the house and it was like...everything I had been dreaming of - the feeling inside them - was coming from there.”

This Todd can understand. Can see it behind his eyes - the house that had grown itself from the dirt - not a house at all, but rather some beacon. Giving off a signal that his attacks could hone in on, draw energy from, and strike back at him with such vengeance. It’s a hard image to shake off, but he tries. 

“Why didn’t you tell anyone you were having nightmares?” He asks.

“Why didn’t you say anything when your attacks were getting worse?” Dirk counters. It’s not confrontational, or accusing, but it is a weapon, laid out on the table, levelling the field. And Todd doesn’t have a real response. 

“I guess we’re both bad at this,” is what he finally says. And the sad, amending smile it coaxes from Dirk is enough for the moment. 

There’s a shift in the room with that. Something unspoken between them that ends the conversation and crosses the line towards rest.

Todd’s last thought as he watches Dirk shut his eyes is _we’re really going back in._ Then, a creeping feeling not too far from dread. The night sinks in with the flavour, soft and insisting that he’s exactly where he’s supposed to be.


	12. The House That Was Never a House

The three of them stand before the house, their shadows elongated, stretching out towards the door. The edges blur and muddy with the dust and gravel. 

“Ready?” Farah asks. She’s stationed, action ready. Posed beside the car with the cable crank connected to the hood. 

“Guess so,” Todd replies. The house is staring back at them. It’s unblinking with its outward promise to be impassive. From their angle Todd can see the window that they had broken. It’s whole again, catching and returning the morning sunlight with a swift rebound. He’s certain no one had come to repair it, but he doesn’t get close enough to confirm. 

Though stationary, Todd can practically hear his own footsteps against the crushed rock. He can easily imagine digging his hands into the dust beneath that window, and pulling them away cradling ragged pieces of glass, materialized like a mirage for him to find.

“Are you ready?” He asks back to Farah. He can feel her eyes on him, watching him as he looks back at the house like he’s engaged in a staring contest with it. It feels less like a game and more like a direct challenge. 

“Training my whole life for this,” Farah says. Todd knows it’s meant to come off light-hearted. Instead he stands on the crunching give of small stones, wrapped up in the morning light and he believes it. The weight of her posture, the strength in her stance. The car, the engine. All of it machinery waiting on hand, carved out with a purpose. Patient and unstalling. 

“We’re really doing this,” Dirk says. There’s a hollow-backed ring to his voice, like it’s echoing inside his own head. He’s been silent so far, fidgeting with himself, rocking from his toes to his heels, eager to get moving, though not so eager to stay trapped in one motion. 

Todd turns his head towards this motion now. The sunlight fires small dots around his vision, stippling the outline of Dirk standing next to him. He can see the fear rolling off of him like waves. Stained into him like ink, like the fade of old walls from soaking up daylight. But he can see the rest of him beneath it too. Smart enough not to block out the sense and structure of what they’ve planned to do. Scared enough to shake a little, face to face with the inevitable.

Todd can feel it too. The coiling stretch of rooms, already winding out before them. 

Farah has the harnesses, and brandishes them like an offering before the house. Todd doesn’t want to look at it for any longer - the door like a mouth, the unbroken windows - so he looks at her instead. She’s stepping towards Dirk with one harness extended, and Dirk embraces the movement and her with it, opening his arms and drawing her into a fast hug as she clips the buckles into place across his back. 

“What if we get back in there and it’s just a dead end,” he asks when she draws back out, adjusting the straps around his chest and Todd bristles at his tone.

“I saw markings leading out of that room. It all pointed that route - that way out,” he replies. Closing his eyes he can see the bird - only it’s still an arrow in his mind - fanning across the floorboards. 

“And if it’s not?”

“Then pull on the cable once and I’ll reel you back out,” Farah says. A reminding jab, insisting that they have a plan. That there’s someone waiting on the outside, no matter what it is that’s waiting for them inside. 

Todd nods along with this insisting, trying to swallow around the bitter taste in his mouth. It’s filled with a horrible image of Farah outside with the crank, pumping the line back out after one pull - or no pulls - and the thing that comes out on the other end of her line isn’t them, isn’t something recognizable as human anymore.

The thought doesn’t go down easy, and he’s got nothing to chase it with but the sunlight pouring down on them from the sky. 

It’s his turn next, and Farah comes to him. The climbing harness slides on easy. It spans across his chest and around his back. It’s tight, cinching in and demanding that he fill his lungs to full capacity, straining out against the buckles.

Todd can see Dirk over Farah’s shoulder, and he tries to flash him a thumbs up, bracing for what’s to come. The gesture comes out a little crazed, teetering at the edges. 

Todd wants to shake the feeling that she’s strapping them into a rocket ship. The kind designed to break apart as it leaves the atmosphere. He can practically taste the fuel, the way it burns, can feel his stomach already starting to drop out. The thin cord connecting his mind to the moment is straining, wanting to snap. 

Farah moves his arms up and away from his sides, testing the straps, and he takes the position to flatten his hands against her shoulders, sucking in a deep inhale of the outside air. It feels like a necessity. Something real, something still _there_ to ground himself to, even as he braces for the ground to drop off from underneath them. 

The next stage of their plan comes in the form of the thick binding of ropes. Farah loops them with the ease of a scout through the hooks and buckles on each of their harnesses. The connection pins them almost shoulder to shoulder, close enough to touch, with just enough give to stand almost back to back. 

Todd notes dimly that they won’t be able to turn around all the way, reflexes will be weighted down. Slow and steady, and he tries to repeat this to himself like a calming mantra. 

“You’re not going to be able to go that fast,” Farah says, as if plucking the beat from his head. 

“As long as we fit down the hallway. I don’t think speed would be very useful anyway,” Todd says, testing out a few rotations of his shoulders. Dirk groans from beside him.

“I do _not_ want to get stuck in that hall,” he says, stumbling back a few inches as Todd tries out a few more movements. “I don’t remember how we got out in the first place.”

“Oh, that was all me,” Todd replies, trying to twist to look at Dirk, but the buckles at their backs catch and scrape together before he can complete the movement. 

“Ah. Right. Good work with that,” Dirk says, shuffling forward and detangling the clasps. The motion almost trips him up, and they catch themselves, backs touching with a near-flat press.

“No problem. Remind me to ask you for a raise when we get back,” Todd says. It’s an attempt at something light, something reminiscent of normal, whatever it was that their normal was - or was capable of being again. He’s nervous, explicitly aware of the knot in the pit of his stomach, and chooses the shapes of his words carefully. _When_ we get back - and he sharpens it like a weapon. 

A mouthy, serrated _IF_ hangs above, and Todd is certain that the others can feel it too. Alongside that _if_ is the tension of three separate heartbeats, their inhales and exhales. The buzz of thoughts - worries, or maybe internal mantras of their own. The beats all clanging and jumbling together into something unspeakable, and the silence from the outside world is the final push, the last stage of preparation.

They approach the house again, Farah feeding the line of cable in a trail behind them. 

There’s no lingering to be done this time. Dirk is angled directly at the front door, and Todd just off to the side next to him. Twisting his neck, he can see Dirk’s profile, taking in the house, staring down the front door much as he had just before, expression flat. 

The warmth beams down from the sun, licks at the metal connecting them, and a foot away from the door they slow, then stop, and it really sinks into Todd’s skin. The closeness of their bodies, bound together, tied up with the pounding of his heart. But there’s something cold inside of him, a small case of dread, untouchable by the daylight.

Dirk slowly lets out a breath, and Todd can feel the compression of his ribcage. Bound together, and Todd draws his shoulders, pressing the heels of his shoes into the gravel. He’s feeling like half his mind is sitting inside Dirk’s skull, their pulses lining up before the shadow of the house.

He can feel it as presently as he can feel the tension down his own spine, the faint ache in his limbs. The pull of it - something drawing him into the house, into the mouth of it, down the hall and through the rooms, what was it Dirk had said? Pressing, pressing ever onwards. 

Todd doesn’t want to press on - to begin again - but something so immense, unmovable and imposing won’t entertain inaction as an option. Instead, his muscles lock up in preparation for their re-entry. 

He’s distinctly aware of the tension running in a narrow line across Dirk’s shoulders. Todd holds his breath, twisting the doorknob while Dirk reaches out to press it open. 

☞

Tidy, bare. No smearing of dust, and nothing disturbed. 

The walls of the room look back at them quietly, and perhaps a little curiously at their new visitors. It’s dark, though not uncomfortably so, the light coming understated through the windows. The door clicks easily shut behind them and they don’t move forwards, taking a moment to adjust. 

It doesn’t feel like a homecoming - returning to a bad memory thought to be faded, like Todd had been anticipating. Instead it feels like he’s playing the role of intruder, breaking in to disturb the peace of a room in a house that he had no right to be in, and no claim to.

_Nothing had happened here,_ the faded walls seem to breathe outwards towards his face. There’s no show of their footprints in the dust on the floor, no dragging, stumbling tracks leading back out. 

A haze rolls in to Todd’s thoughts, not blinding him or rearranging his mind, but encouraging - merely offering a soft suggestion - that the days before and time spent inside the house had been nothing. A false memory, a bad dream. It feels like a slow stretch, an exhale, soft encouragement to ease up the rigid ready of his muscles. Through the silence, the golden glow of the windows, Todd almost sags into the feeling. 

But _there,_ Dirk gripping at his forearm and pointing downwards. _There,_ on the floor near the entrance was something new. 

The small belongings they had sifted through - mostly clothes - were stacked just as plainly as they had been the first time. At first glance, it’s another point to that hazy, soft suggestion, coming from the walls - _you had never really been here._ But the jagged persisting of Dirk’s finger points to the one small difference - one new addition.

Two handheld police-style radios. 

They’re stationary and intact, though Todd can hear the echo explode inside his head - the clattering sound of impact as his had fallen and smashed to the floor.

Now it sits whole again, tucked neatly next to Dirk’s beside the folded stacks of clothes. Their addition to the pile, their contribution to the sprawling rooms. 

_Real, all of it, even the parts that weren’t,_ Todd’s mind suddenly presses. It comes with a sinking feeling. That cold, internal dread feeling. Beside him Dirk takes a sideways step, shaking his head as if trying to dispel a similar thought. 

The walls then seem to darken, the light through the windows flickering - like the streetlamp outside the kitchen, Dirk’s eyes from the floor to Todd’s body - and the feeling truly comes seeping back into Todd. 

The feeling of wrenching backwards, the sensation of falling. The communicator smashing to pieces in the struggle - him versus his mind versus the house - the thickly fluid smear across his hands as he reached into the walls, dragging Dirk down that twisted hall. 

Todd looks around again, his eyes feeling new, sharper and lost. The paint - or is it wallpaper? - around the room appears to lift up at the edges, peeling away from the baseboards, curling up and running like insects, like a lip into a cruel sneer. 

“Do you see that?” Todd asks, twisting in his harness and feeling one of Dirk’s shoulder blades pressing into his side in response. 

“It knows we know,” Dirk says back in an instant. “It isn’t pretending anymore.” 

A thought comes to him then, cutting through the haze with such ferocity that it seems to chase the fog away completely. He voices it out loud.

“There was nothing around the house the first time, was there? No tire tracks, no weeds...”

“No,” Dirk confirms. “Not a trace of anything.”

There hadn’t been. _Hadn’t,_ and the sureness of this thought casts off more of that smoke and dreamy daze the walls had been trying to cloak him with. 

No glass or garbage, nothing at all behind the fence. Desolate land, just grey crushed rock, and all that undisturbed dust inside.

Todd is left with the creeping feeling that if they were to open the door, and look back out into the empty lot that there would be nothing once again.

No tire tracks in the dust. No Farah, no car. No buildings along the edges of the street - no street at all, no sky.

There’s a part of him that wants to check immediately - wants to see Farah, standing in sunlight. But another part holds firm, and won’t let him even suggest it. To leave just to check would still be to leave, and to leave would mean he’d have to come back in, and he’s not sure he could convince himself to do it twice, pull or not. He’s not sure how they made it in again in the first place without much fuss. Though now, caught up in reflecting on it, it hadn’t felt like it was their choice at all. 

Farah, at the agency, thinking out loud - _how had birds gotten in to an underground passage?_ and it feels like another thought that doesn’t belong to him - imposed by the strangeness of the quiet walls. 

“Why?” Dirk asks, and it snaps Todd back into the room. “What are you thinking?” Todd opens his mouth to respond, frowns and closes it. There’s a scramble of thoughts and feelings in a swirl inside his mind, and he finds that sifting it into translatable sense to be harder than it should be. How to explain the choppy waters of his own thoughts, altered by the house, by the pressing feeling of Dirk’s body. His thoughts feel like they’re being sucked out of his head, scattering to join the dust on the floor, drawn away from the moment, from the thin reality of where he stands. 

“Like a black hole,” Todd manages to say, casting off the urge to rub his eyes, afraid that if he does something will appear in the room when he opens them again. “God, this place messes with my head...” Dirk makes a sound from his side. Something Todd can sense is understanding, truly understanding him, though all it is is a thin whine. 

“Nothing nearby, hardly anything inside of it...what if it’s drawing things in, sucking everything close to it in and then breaking it down, using it to recreate images?” It half-makes sense to him, like faded, partial theory. All the furniture crowded down that passageway, all that emptiness, all those visions wrenched from the lining of his reeling head.

“Then original building would fit that,” Dirk says. Todd tries to turn to face him, but the bite of his shoulder strap levels him back to the side. 

“How do you mean?” 

“The photos Farah had from the library, the original building had two floors,” Dirk says. There’s no connection to Dirk’s words in Todd’s mind, and he looks around the room for a sign that he’s disconnecting too. The walls are still curled up at the edges, not so impassive now, but the blame licks out from inside of him, not the room. The chiding reminder that he’s put the least amount of work into this case.

He can see it now - Dirk and Farah sitting together while he was off alone, nursing his temper in the red wake of his attacks. 

Then it’s Farah saying that regardless of what they saw, went through, they hadn’t brought anything back with them - nothing physical, at least. Dirk’s bad dreaming, the hole in Todd’s face, his skin, fingers, the white surge of electricity. 

“Oh, shit,” Todd says, something clicking into place as they slowly walk across the room, towards that first dollop of paint against the floor. 

“Farah said we hadn’t brought anything back with us, but I put a postcard in my pocket after we got separated.” He’s barely finished his sentence when he realizes with a sinking startle that he’s wearing the same jacket.

Autopilot takes over, making him reach into the pocket. His elbow knocks backwards into Dirk, who squirms slightly against the movement. He can feel the paper against his fingers, and pulls it out. Some part of him already seems to know what it will look like before he looks down at it. 

It’s blank. A raggedy scrap of paper. No print, no text, no image smiling up at him, so happy that he wasn’t there. 

Dirk moves, a slight twist and raising up on his toes to look at what Todd’s holding. 

“That’s - ” Dirk falls short as Todd turns, wordlessly taking the scrap of junk from his hands. Dirk looks at it blankly for a moment before his expression is taken over by a furrowed blend of recognition and confusion.

“That’s strange, for a second I thought...” he trails off, turning the paper over.

“Did you see something?” Todd asks. It’s the far less personal version of what he meant, and Dirk glances at him sideways like he’s interpreted it anyway. _What did you see? Did it try to be something for you?_

“I think knowing that it’s playing tricks on us is making it register differently,” Dirk says. He clicks on his flashlight as they pass into the second room, darker now. The beam stays still, with nothing jumping out to be focused on throughout the next room, and then the next.

The eeriness of the hollow and vacant rooms gnaw along the edges of their shadows, narrating all the nothingness with a low chatter. The sinking feeling is present and prominent in Todd’s stomach as they walk, and that drag of emptiness keeps nipping at the back of his neck. The image of the house from the outside, surrounded by a flat grey void. Stones in his stomach, sinking him down, pulling at the both of them. 

They’re about to enter the fifth room - the entranceway before the hall - when the nip at Todd’s neck becomes too persistent to ignore. 

Then Todd does turn around - or try to, anyway, twisting the restraints hard against his back and spinning Dirk out slightly. 

“What?” Dirk asks as his body goes pliant in response to Todd’s action. 

“Fuck,” Todd says for lack of anything better, staring forward. He then shifts his position, pulling Dirk around to face the same way. Todd extends an arm to point back the way they came, and Dirk’s eyes follow the gesture. 

“Oh, God, so we are going down,” Dirk says, practically in a whisper beside him. 

The cable extending from their restraints has followed them through the fourth room. Only instead of pointing straight out, or even dragging along the floor behind them, the tightly braided rope extends from the top of the door. From the ceiling of the third room, pointing down from a wider than forty five degree angle to connect to their backs.

“Pull,” Todd murmurs, unaware he’s said anything out loud until Dirk responds.

“Pull? Pull what?” He asks, and Todd shakes himself out of his head. 

“Outside,” he starts. “Nothing around, and those dead plants on the floor in here...if it’s pulling everything towards it...” 

Todd can imagine the house, much the same but more secluded. Simply an abandoned lot, before the fences went up. He can see shadows moving towards it - figures. Outcasts and drifters, looking for shelter. People and things not so attached to the outside world, moving towards the house like a hidden orbit.

The house standing there amidst the concrete and the cold. Unassuming, deceitful in its solitude. That sinking feeling comes back to Todd with the image. It’s too easy to imagine that the entranceway would have that soft glow around the edges no matter the time of day. 

“Could be pulling people towards it too,” Dirk says next, finishing his thought and solidifying that strange, outside feeling that they’re connected by more than buckles and rope. 

Todd stumbles back around, unable to look towards the elongated stretch of rope anymore. He doesn’t want to face the visual confirmation that they’re descending - or were they? Could the rope be manipulated by the watching walls as well? He shakes his head, facing the next door, the next dash of paint against the floor. His mind feels ripe and stuffed with thoughts repeating, demanding to be heard but too slippery to be held on to.

Angler fish lures, the clasping mouth of fly traps. The dizziness leaking out around him, encouraging and so intoxicating. He can see the imprints of bodies and blood behind his eyes as they inch closer to the next door. 

“What do you think this place actually looks like?” Dirk asks. His words feel like Todd’s own thoughts. Empty in their vague spinning, biding for time before they cross into the next room.

“It must have looked inviting for so many people to climb in and get lost in it,” Todd replies. He can see with every blink a version of the house from the outside, still amid that blank grey pocket. He can see it existing as a home, a motel, a shelter from the storm. Something either so comfortingly familiar or so curiously inescapable. The paint on the floor is inching closer as they move, slowly and not so surely. Just before they cross it, Todd thinks somewhat bitterly how of course it was a dusty, abandoned house for them. Something secretive, something to be explored.

The air feels thick and hazy as they walk along unevenly. The downward angle of the rope behind them has Todd unwillingly imagining mines, with hidden holes of poisoned air.

This thought spurs on another, thinking they should be in full hazmat gear and Todd is aware enough to sense that it’s more of that disjointed, unfamiliar thinking that had swept him under the first time. Recognizing the strangeness isn’t enough to write the thought off as being an entirely bad idea. 

“We should have brought gas masks,” he says, mostly to himself. The overkill would be gratifying if nothing else. 

“Some kind of supernaturally imposed gas leak?” Dirk suggests from his side. “Making people hallucinate their fears?” Todd shrugs a response. The gesture is deformed by the harnesses. 

They’re at the end of the room now, standing just before that little nook. The paint on the ground the centrepiece of the doorframe. Todd doesn’t want to look down at it, fearing in some blurring way that if he does it will look back up at him, and maybe speak.

_Beak and wings, the arrow, this way...  
a beacon, a pull, follow, come closer... _

It’s Dirk who takes the first step into the little entryway. Todd follows like a shadow, noticing the wall to his left as Dirk looks forward - or down - into the darkened hall. 

The wall is the same peeling shade of off-white that the other rooms had been, but a light switch sits on this one - something Todd hadn’t noticed the first time. 

He’s sure he couldn’t have seen in that first time, too. The exposed wiring and glint to the metal edges was the same as his attack, and he rubs his fingers up his forearms, hearing the crackle of electricity inside his head.

“It just keeps morphing...adapting to whoever comes into it...” Todd says. Again, he’s not entirely sure he’s spoken out loud, like his thoughts had been interrupted by the imposing block of shapes inside the darkness. He stares into the hall for a moment, flashlight still pointed at the ground. 

“I wonder what it looked like to everyone else,” Dirk finishes. 

“I wonder what would happen if we recorded it,” Todd says next. He’s trying to appreciate the stale air of the empty nook before they enter the hall - descend into it. The thought of the hall being a downward pit makes his stomach swoop. 

“I doubt it would record at all - electronics, remember?” Dirk counters. 

“Right,” Todd amends, tearing his eyes away from the hole in the wall. He looks sideways at Dirk instead, watching the unblinking way he’s chasing the light from his beam into the lurking shapes of the hall. 

Todd can see him much as he was the first time - just before that first descent. His face damn near melting off his skull in the struggling effort of holding it together, the glow of that never-ending chase stampeding through his eyes.

_“Dirk.”_ Todd tries to pull him into focus, his fingers moving in a stumble across Dirk’s arm. His own voice feels garbled to his ears, like he’s only trying to speak, or speaking under water. _Look at me, just look at me, don’t look into it right now,_ and then Dirk does, turning his head away from the doorway and towards Todd, like he’s tuned into that mute frequency.

His eyes are wide, wet and cradled in the strange shadows of the end of the small half-room they’re in. The chase still on, but the lights on too, gears still capable of turning and not fading into that silent, vacant state he’d entered either before the wall or inside of it, sometime after Todd had lost sight of him. The circles of his irises are spinning somehow, his pupils a pinprick beneath the outward beam from the flashlight and for a moment Todd can see into the movement. The shadows, the searching line of light, and it’s a circular saw blade, a dog chasing its tail. Wheels, whirlpools, ouroboros. 

What Todd wants to say feels far off. Something living in the fibres of his muscles, but not his tongue, and he scrapes around the lining of his brain for the right words. 

“Look man, we’re going to be okay, so let’s do this,” is what he ends up with. Dirk looks at him strangely once he’s said it, and Todd is overcome with that strange sensation from before their first visit to the house. That stretched-out snow globe oddness, something present but unseen inside the room with them. It’s something that suggests to him that he can feel the undercurrent of someone else, and understand their feelings despite hardly recognizing his own. 

This feeling is wholly present now, sprinkling down onto his scalp from the ceiling. The ceiling that isn’t a ceiling, not inside this place where up is really out, and backwards is up, and forwards down, but also twisting, morphing, so unknown. 

That the strange look Dirk is displaying, directed sideways to him now is telling him without saying anything that somehow Dirk is the one that knows what he was trying to say. Like they’re locked together in ways that go beyond the fasteners restricting their movements. 

Then it’s fading, melting off as quickly as it had struck him, and Todd still feels entirely unaware of what the right words could have been. 

“Will you go first?” Dirk asks next. From his right side, Dirk’s eyes are caught on the shape of Todd, curiously and quietly taking him in, and spinning, spinning.

“Sure,” Todd says without thinking. Standing before the narrow hall, shapes bulging outwards at them, he can hardly remember slipping into it last time. Bracing for this new angle of re-entry, Todd thinks that maybe a different route is what they need to access that different outcome. In position, side by side with Dirk’s beam jutting out to light Todd’s path, Todd takes a breath, holds it, trying to soothe the frying snap of his nerves. 

It’s something that unnerves him more than the house, the descent, the threat of dark and bloodied shapes around him - Dirk behind him, lighting but not leading the way. It’s something that must be significant when placed alongside all the times Dirk has gone running into things, with Todd chasing, trailing behind him. And here, now, he’s been trusted with the reins, asked to dive in. 

Todd exhales slowly, praying that the air takes some of the pressure with it. Levelling his shoulders as best he can in their strained position. _Trust,_ he thinks, pressing it into his mind like a fortress. _You get us in, I’ll get us out._

Todd steps into the hallway first. First really means sideways but ahead, and Dirk is there with every step, taking angled sidesteps, navigating the tight path. 

The fear of being buried by a wooden avalanche is distant this round. It’s been replaced with the dread of the rest of the house - and the nagging bite of doubt, wondering if the pieces of furniture are real at all.

Todd finds himself thinking of the bulk of shadowed shapes as warnings and not just obstacles. Like a levelled wall built by something separate from what the house wants - if the house _wants_ at all. It’s harder to imagine the others who came before them, making their own way down this harrowed hallway, choosing to carry on forwards. In another sense, Todd thinks it may have been easier - to keep moving forwards, not knowing that it’s really down. This thought is the one that calms his fast and wary heartbeat when he knocks into a sideways table, and the thing teeters behind them. 

_If it does fall, would it not fall_ forwards, _and not down on top of us?_ Todd wonders.

“I think it would still take us with it if that happened,” Dirk responds, and Todd startles somewhat, jostling the arm Dirk is holding the flashlight in awkwardly to light their path. Again, he hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud - and wonders next if Dirk’s just inside his head the way he semi-feels inside of Dirk. This time there’s no response, just the eyeless stare of the shapes surrounding them, built around them like a sprawling city.

They’re almost out of the hall now - less and less words being shared between them, perhaps snuffed out by the pressure of the towered trail. Todd can’t help thinking warily that maybe the sense of time and the length of the hall are all just factors in the illusion, that the tension is being scrapped by the drooling hunger from the rooms ahead - _we’ve done this, we know this, let’s get to the main course..._

It’s there up ahead - that next entranceway. Todd can smell it as well as sense it in the prickling of his skin. Stiff hairs and goosebumps raised like armour as they press out of the pitching hall and into that small cove of a room at the end of it. It scent croons outwards from there - the gasoline, underbelly, alcohol whisper of paint.

It’s as it was the first time, with no new tricks. No room for tricks, Todd suspects. The room is still barely a room at all, just a gap of walls, a negative space. Some hole in the house that wasn’t the hall, and wasn’t the room coming next. Todd knows it’s still coming next, can feel it as if the room is the thing approaching.

He can feel it more so when Dirk stills beside him, both of them unmoving and together, taking breaths that rattle their restraints. 

“I think this might be the worst bit,” Dirk says quietly to him as they stand. The feeling Todd hates and is struggling with so deeply returns as Dirk speaks. The bone-deep rhythm that whispers inside the confines of his skin - _right where you’re supposed to be._ It feels magnified by the strange hole of a room they’re stood in. The whole purpose of this cove - Todd thinks. To stand in, gathering tight knots of time. To know what’s to come - to not-know, rather. To think about all the terrible possibilities. And maybe that thinking is what the house is drawing from them. Recreating, in those rooms ahead. 

“Fuck this, come on,” Todd says, dispelling the feeling from his skin. He yanks his shoulders forwards to point the way, stepping across the yellow paint on the floor. Dirk staggers along with him, and if he’s shocked by the sudden call to action, he rights his balance fast enough to cover it. 

☞

The yellow room tries to welcome them garishly. The lights exploding into that white-fire _pop_ overhead, but Todd doesn’t let them pause to acknowledge it. The glow from the doorway into the next room is calling, and he surges them towards it - no thoughts, no contemplation, no time for fear or possibilities. The red light reaches out for them, bleeding into the yellow and a contaminated orange glow licks along their outlines like radiation. 

☞

Todd’s aggressive forward motion sends them almost tumbling into the red room, pushing through the doorframe. 

A crack appears in Todd’s hot-headed descent, and the red light pulsing out to consume them doesn’t give him time to patch it. 

Another awkward and weighted step forwards and Todd is thinking demons, portals to hell, bodies and burning and twisted faces all around them. Every nightmare he’s had weaved around him, the tortured wailing of everyone he’s ever known. He shuts his eyes, feeling the fast tugs around his chest every time Dirk takes a breath, and shoves them forwards. 

☞


	13. The Object in the room

They’re not inside Todd’s red room when he opens his eyes again. No blood, no bodies, and no weaponized shards from the ceiling pointed down towards them. 

The red light has washed out entirely, and something close to relief tries to edge in through that growing crack instead. It shakes hands with confusion, and the puzzling mix takes over. Blinking, Todd twists against the harnesses still keeping them tightly connected, and he looks around the room they’re standing in. 

It seems empty, and this is another point for that relieved and confused blend inside his head. He sweeps the walls with his eyes, and tries to turn back towards Dirk when the headache comes.

It’s nothing compared to his post-attack hours. Just a prickling whine against the cap of his skull, and a faint sound from inside his ears, like pressure leaking out of a compressed bottle. 

“What do you reckon this is?” Todd asks, trying to persuade the strange tinniness of his head to leave. He rotates his neck, relieving nothing but a few cracks.

Dirk doesn’t answer from his side, and Todd twists again against the harness, trying to face him better. Dirk stands rigidly beside him, and Todd can feel the ragged pattern of his pulse start to leech from Dirk’s side into his. 

“What is it?” Todd asks, and the ring around his skull becomes a fast lash of a bite, rising with his heart rate.

“The same as it was last time,” Dirk says back to him, though his eyes aren’t anywhere near Todd. They’re pointed outwards into the room, a straight line into the strangely weightless space before them, all dark grey and almost liquid in its inoccupancy. 

Then the fear comes crawling back into Todd. It finds an opening in the wound Dirk’s fixed staring has started to dig. It comes back with the image of how unresponsive Dirk had been when Todd had pulled him from the wall. The hollow person-shaped air beside him in that doorway, the tunnel that had carved itself.

It’s a cold and dripping fear that carves a tunnel through the pit of Todd’s stomach now, makes sweat congeal on the palms of his hands. He twists further, feeling the protest burrow into the meat of his shoulders from the straps, but Dirk still doesn’t turn towards him - just keeps his gaze fixed straight ahead, locked onto something Todd can’t see inside the empty room. 

_I’m going to lose him again,_ Todd thinks, feeling his neck start to turn towards that vacant space in front of them. _He’s here, but i’m not here with him. He’s going to disappear again._

Now Todd is fully pointed like an arrow towards the same space Dirk is. His headache finds that hole in his stomach, and reaches for it in a nauseous choir. There’s a static - both in his vision and the room around him, something like a buzzing, a pressure in his head, and through the emptiness a shape comes through. 

It’s not discernible at first. More like the drop-shadow of an object that isn’t there, and it sits like a darker smudge against the floor.

“What is that?” Todd asks, the tense wire of fear temporarily leaving his body as he stares in confusion at the not-thing. It doesn’t move, or object to his gaze. Just sits like an empty block, like something his eyes can’t quite get right. Todd looks back to the only familiar sight in the room, who is also staring at the object.

“That’s the tank,” Dirk replies, and the empty nest of his words houses either some kind of fuel or strength that the shape seems to feed on, and it solidifies just outside of Todd’s vision. 

The hairs on the back of Todd’s neck pull up a tightened grimace. Unblinking, muscles taut beneath his skin, he feels the presence of it, compelling him to turn back and _look._ And he does.

☞

It’s a technical looking thing, rectangular and long, enclosed on all sides and filled with dark water. Todd frowns at it - more puzzled than afraid in an instant, but he can feel a shudder roll off of Dirk and cling to his skin like cold oil. The object merely sits there, looking like some mecha blend of a bathtub and a tanning booth, but too tall on all sides to be either. 

“What is it?” Todd asks, the scouring path of his eyes giving him no answer. He can hear Dirk’s dry swallow from beside him.

“That’s the tank,” Dirk repeats. The tone of his voice has a shattered quake to it, and Todd twists back to look at him. He’s said it like the word belongs to something many-toothed and bloodthirsty, something that wants to maul. And the object stays where it is, still and smooth.

“But what it?” Todd asks again. He feels completely removed from that strange collecting sense of understanding. 

“Sensory deprivation,” Dirk says. It comes out raw.

“Why is this here?” Todd asks, trying to take a step towards the thing, but the rigid plank of Dirk’s body won’t let him go towards it without any straining effort. 

“They wanted to see what would happen if they cut us off from everything,” Dirk says. It’s a little quieter this time, like he’s sighing against Todd’s attempt to draw them nearer.

“Blackwing? They _put_ you in this?” Todd asks, a slow dawn of realization starting to rise within him. The dark water is as still as the glass it’s trapped behind, reflecting them back.

“When I first got there,” Dirk answers. Still with that gristle, and that tightness. “And frequently onwards.” 

Todd can see Dirk in the glass now, can see the dead stare of his eyes looking past their images and deeper into the tank, and Todd tries to follow his gaze to see what else he’s missing. 

It stretches out to cover the inside of his head like a patchwork quilt of things still not making sense. Farah asking _how did you end up inside the walls? _and Dirk’s answer - _I went into it._ Then Dirk’s voice from where he had been laying on a mattress in front of him - _they told me to._ The darkness of the water, unmoving against the glass. Blackwing, experiments running on uncoordinated legs. __

__It’s poorly stitched - a hazy image put together by Todd now, still so hazy on the details that Dirk kept so tightly wrapped inside. But they’re details he can’t bury entirely. They present to him, rearing fanged and drooling heads in the way Dirk presses himself backwards into walls and corners when faced with confrontation and harsh realities._ _

__The version reflected in the glass now is much more reminiscent of Dirk’s ill-fitting silent days than that other - _real_ \- version Todd still recognized first. A conjured up illusion, missing some vital aspect._ _

__Something bright and wild, vastly confusing and as ever-changing as the rooms inside the house.  
Todd has to look away from the glass and water-warped image of them, and twist to the side to see Dirk. Even now, locked up in shadows and that tense grip of fear, Todd can see him. More like the rippling sprawl of stars and paths he had seen through that cosmic vision with Amanda than anything else he had ever seen._ _

__He tries to envision Dirk locked up in some facility, being studied and prodded and ‘contained,’ and the image refuses to fix in his mind. It’s offensive in how little it makes sense - more illogical than Dirk could ever be._ _

__“How’d you end up there? Weren’t you just a kid?” Todd asks him, again more like he’s just thinking with his tongue than really meaning to say anything at all._ _

__Dirk’s face changes, almost moves towards his. Todd wants to count it as a victory against the house - drawing Dirk further away from that unresponsive state - but the expression that takes over is pained, like he had been strung by something sharp and was trying to ignore it._ _

__“My parents didn’t have much money and I caused them a lot of trouble, being like this,” Dirk says. He’s blinking now, dispelling some of that reflected image from his own eyes. “And Blackwing made an offer that solved both of those problems.”_ _

__Todd stands at his side in silence, a little stunned, though mostly stunned by how unsurprised he was by it. In fact, letting the words settle over him Todd decides that it’s more of a shock that Dirk had shared it without much coaxing than what it was he had shared at all. And then it wears off, and Todd’s left with a spiking flare of anger that feels as familiar as breathing._ _

__The anger mutates next, morphing into something that feels all at once larger than the house, and large enough to fill that grey void surrounding it too. It’s his own personal brand - that post-attack anger - like the red light of his gore room had burrowed underneath his skin. Breeding with his pills and temper, the offspring going dormant to grow silently within him._ _

__But it stirs now, a deep simmer, and Todd thinks that if he were to unleash it then the air around them would ignite. Instead he swallows the burn._ _

__“That’s fucking horrible, man,” he says. “Fuck that. Fuck Blackwing, fuck this stupid tank. We’re getting out of here.” He pivots them as he finishes speaking, rotating their bodies together to point at the wall to the right. The wall there looks back at him like it’s eyeing them up._ _

__“You said that you had seen another marking on the floor in your room, right Todd?” Dirk asks as Todd is pivoting them again, turning to face the opposite wall now._ _

__“Yeah, in the other doorway,” Todd mutters, angling them for a third time._ _

__“Right, see this is the issue I had the first time,” Dirk says a little quieter as Todd spins them around completely, looking at the fourth complete wall._ _

__There were no doors, including the one they had entered through._ _

__

__☞_ _

__

__“Okay, awesome,” Todd says, righting his posture to face the original way they had been. “So you went through a wall last time...”_ _

__“I didn’t go through a wall,” Dirk says. Confused by more than the lack of doors now, Todd glances over at him._ _

__“What do you mean? I thought you told Farah you went into it.” He can see it clearly inside his head - the curve of Dirk’s spine as the wall spat him back out, the greasy shine of fluid against his own hands, replacing the blood that had flooded from his body, from the bodies of his dead friends._ _

__“Yes, I went into the tank,” Dirk answers, shaking the images out of Todd’s mind._ _

__“Into the - ” The words fall away from Todd’s tongue, crumbling into nothingness, swallowed by the shadows of the room. Dirk wasn’t letting him inch towards the tank, and the thought of him on his own getting inside the thing didn’t sit right with Todd._ _

__“There’s a door on that,” Dirk adds, his voice sounding more than a little strung out in the wake of Todd’s silence. “A ladder on the other side.”_ _

__“Oh - Okay,” Todd says, trying to wrap his head around it. “Well, that didn’t go so well for you.”_ _

__“No, it never did,” Dirk says, and the bitter ache of it snaps Todd back into action._ _

__“Come on, there’s going to be another way out of this,” Todd says. Dead-set on making their way out of the room, Todd pulls Dirk along beside him. Dirk falls into a begrudging pace at his side as Todd makes a beeline for the centre of the far wall. As they fall into the shadow of the tank, Todd looks at the side of it, and makes eye contact with something in the water._ _

__Flinching back with a shout, Todd connects with the unprepared weight of Dirk’s body, knocking them back at a precarious slant that nearly topples them both._ _

__“There’s something in there.” The words come out in a heated rush, both conspiratorial and alarmed._ _

___“Oh,”_ Dirk says, placing a cautious hand on Todd’s forearm as they both regain their balance. “I didn’t think that you’d see that too.” _ _

__“Jesus, what is that?” Todd asks, feeling the clench of the harness against his chest, restricting the breaths he’s taking._ _

__“It’s a body. Todd, how are we getting out of here?” Dirk says in a quick mutter, trying to edge them towards the walls on his side._ _

__“Right, uh, we’re...” Todd stammers off into silence, the buzz still present in his ears like the distant whine of construction. The thing in the tank has gained more form now, drifting with a bloated and warped quality behind the glass._ _

__He can see Dirk’s reflection beside him more clearly than he can see the still mostly shapeless body in the water. Dirk’s shrunken back, keeping Todd as a barrier between him and it. In that moment, in that fractured grey reflection Todd can see him as he stood in that stone fantasy chamber - beaten down and defeated, sulking like a shadow on the wall._ _

__“Getting out of here,” Todd repeats robotically, blinking the Wendimoor version of Dirk out of his head. It had already proved its point though - Todd had never felt quite so riddled with purpose as he did when Dirk had given up on things. Todd couldn’t pluck fantastical events from the mundane, couldn’t take action and bring forth change, even within himself most of the time. But he could still _push._ Push those plucked events forward, push people - usually away, though forward too this past year at least. _ _

__He’s struck again by how insane it had felt to him at the time, for Dirk to be standing in some magic realm surrounded by creatures and adventure and still _need_ that push at all. But he had - and it had worked, and Todd squeezes hold of it now, needing it to work again. _ _

__The shadowed emptiness of the rest of the room seems to shift around them as Todd shifts his weight, digging into his own mind to find what to say to spark on their next action. What he’s met with at first is that clouded grey vision of the house they’re in, sat amid a void of empty space. He casts it off, though in its wake doesn’t feel he has the sense or structure left inside himself to conjure up another pep talk, even one riddled with so many spikes and holes._ _

__“Wendimoor,” he says instead, spitting out the last concrete thought he had had._ _

__“What?” Dirk asks helplessly beside him. He sounds desperate, already half-lost to it, and this jumpstarts something in Todd. Some more revving up of those pockets of flaring rage, frustrated crumbs of his attacks._ _

__“Wendimoor, how our attacks were really happening - ” He’s building with the scraps of things inside his head, imaging it’s the same thing the house is doing to them. He’s got an image of Amanda kneeling over him, telling him to take control of it. Dirk’s voice in his head, shouting at someone else to _acknowledge and engage!_ _ _

__“So what?” Dirk asks, not sardonically but almost pleading, like he’s trying to see the light of Todd’s sudden direction, trying to see something else in the room with them at all._ _

__“So what if it’s like it’s some kind of test?” Todd presses, pushes at him. “Like the room gives you something and you have to beat it!” He wants to add to it, to let the thought keep growing from his mouth into the room, but he can feel the shrink of Dirk beside him, the growing bulge of rippled shapes from the shadows around them. It feels lost - his own thoughts, the path they’re on._ _

___Like all my episodes were practice for this place, and maybe those tests in Blackwing, whatever they were..._ He’s almost found his footing to say this out loud too, but then Dirk’s eyes are scattering away from him, like he’s being called to from the shapes, whatever they were trying to be shaped like. _ _

__Todd wheels to look at him now, to call him back from whatever else was trying to. He tries to at least, and spins them both off into the room a bit. He can feel a manic spread beginning to cling to his own eyes, can feel some surge of that red-hot energy, but he doesn’t stamp it out, instead takes hold of it, runs with it._ _

__“It tried to get me to go into it... _its_ way, but I didn’t, and I got out through another door, so - ” he twists back to look at the tank, then the empty socket of a room around it. “So we just need to get past this and find another route out.” Dirk looks at him sideways, a frown taking over the shadows of his face, but he lets Todd move them forwards, unlocking his joints and giving in to Todd’s intensity. _ _

__Todd reaches out towards the glass, pressing a hand against it in a sliding motion, searching for a latch or hint at what to do next. He stiffens up at the touch, skin crawling in response to the contact; it’s as warm as the walls had been, with a bit of give, fleshy and malleable._ _

__He’s worked his way around the corner of the thing, and built into the other side is the ladder Dirk had mentioned. The rungs look sharp, like something carved from the floors of a cave, shiny-wet and jagged._ _

___Just another version of that tunnel,_ he’s thinking grimly, forcing his own investigative movements forward. He’s taking the steps with his eyes, following the path of them down to where they connect with the floor of the room, and seem to reach into the floor, continuing down unbothered by what seemed like a solid dead end for their path._ _

__Todd is about to mention it, opening his mouth to suggest it’s a way out for them too when the body in the water moves._ _

__It jerks forward towards them in a frantic, uncoordinated leap towards the glass that has Todd leaping back away from the tank. Dirk staggers beside him, snapping a hand in a claw-grip against Todd’s shoulder._ _

__“No, no, no,” Dirk starts repeating, pulling at Todd with his pinching grip, dragging them backwards in stuttering increments._ _

__Todd is stuck, even as his body is wrenched backwards in bursts. He’s frozen in the gaze of the thing in the water - trapped in the intensity of its warped and bulging eyes. Huge misshapen bubbles of air are flowing out of it’s opened mouth, it’s fingers churning against the water creating thin white trails._ _

__It’s _screaming,_ Todd realizes, captivated by the thing’s face. It’s swollen in the water, pale and grotesquely dead, but undeniably young at the same time. A child’s corpse, screaming and trying to tread water, though already entirely consumed by it. _ _

__The sound carries through the glass, muffled and pleading, but Todd can’t make any sense out of the words, Dirk glued beside him, begging in his ears too, for him to _get away from it, get away from it, we have to go, don’t go near it!_ _ _

___Okay, fine,_ Todd’s thinking. _We have to go, we have to get out, but WHERE?_ and he turns his head away from the drowned but still drowning boy, searching the empty pit of the room again. But without a full range of movement he’s just trapped looking at the tank again - the biting metal of the ladder, the rungs disappearing into the floor, the top of the tank like the tunnel, like a mouth into the walls - the belly - of the house -_ _

__Todd’s swept into it for a split second. A creeping line of fear tapping into his veins, aiming for his heart. He can feel it stumble in his chest, a heavy drop in his stomach and for a moment, the top of the tank isn’t an enclosed lid at all, but a flat bed of industrial strip lightbulbs. Todd stares at it, the flesh of his throat and the pounding of his pulse beneath tenses up, flinching at the sight of it. Beside him, Dirk pulling against their harnesses and Todd blinks and it’s gone again, just the smooth domed top of the tank again._ _

__“None of this is real,” Todd says suddenly, drawing the words from some place removed from the rest of him. Then again, with more force and more anger - “None of this is real!” It’s fuelled by that red-hot that’s waiting to jump out, furious with himself that he’s let it get into his head again._ _

__“You were all dead in that room, but you weren’t, _I_ was dead in that room but I’m not...” His eyes lose track of the terrible thing in the tank then, trace back to the rungs of the ladder, carrying on through the bottom of the room._ _

__“It isn’t real, none of it is really here,” Todd’s voice, rising now, begins to drown out the garbled, sodden sounds the thing behind the glass is making. Todd turns, severing the pinching grip Dirk has on his shoulders to look him in the eye, the restraints struggling to allow the movement._ _

__“Dirk, none of this is real! You have to break the illusion! It’s all in your head, we’re _inside your head!_ You have to make it not real!” He’s shouting now, taking a solid hold of Dirk’s upper arms and pressing his weight into them. _ _

__Dirk’s gaze is caught and sliding between Todd and the tank, his eyes distorted like a fishbowl lens by either the light or else just Todd’s perception, warping like the glass. Then Dirk’s eyes drop as he looks down at what he’s holding - the flashlight in his hands, silver and cylindrical - and Todd can see the clarity take over the grimace on his face. Dirk cocks a shoulder back - the sudden motion jerks Todd backwards too, and then they’re both lurching forward as Dirk throws it violently._ _

__

__It connects with the side of the tank and a spiderweb of cracks fan out from where it strikes. There’s a split second of time where Todd can feel the breath freeze inside his chest and then the glass is busting open, and the water comes flooding out._ _

__

__It hits them like a solid wall of force, soaking them both to the bone in an instant. The last thing Todd sees before it covers his eyes is that image of the tank vanish instantly, the illusion shattered alongside the glass._ _

__Then the water, washing down his thoughts with it, washing out his own defiant words._ _

___It’s not real, none of it is real!_ But some of it _must_ be real if it’s real enough to soak in, and maybe if he keeps sinking down that line of thinking it’ll be real enough to drown in too. _ _

__It doesn’t feel like the water is what’s trying to drown him. With every breath he manages to snag against the crashing, rising water, a stark image from his memory gasps up too. Dirk inside the wall, not even shaking, just coiled and given up. Dirk saying he didn’t get out of the house, that he wouldn’t have without him, how they only got out because they were together._ _

__Another sheet of water slamming in wet violence against his body - the stabbing edge of the light fixture, the jetting spurt of blood, the bodies on the floor, Amanda - how he had only got out of that room because of Amanda - another winding punch of water - and suddenly she’s there._ _

__

__Amanda - there in the room, somehow above the water, untouched by it._ _

__

__Todd’s eyes are bleary, flooded too, her image waterlogged and he claws against the force. Then something shifts, a page of texture, grain against the water, like a television set correcting the colour. A shift, and she’s not above the water, but standing on the floor, _through_ the water, either she or it simply not there. _ _

__

__There’s a single strand of thought left inside his head now - a formidable warning that if he’s blacking out from his physical form, leaving his body to converse with her across some other plain, he’s only got a moment of breath left to do it before he won’t be able to return. Holding on to this thread, the next boring tide of water hits him, and he draws in as much air as he can, and he focuses on her form, rippling and unbothered by the current._ _

__

__☞_ _

__

__She’s dressed plainly, with more dimension, more movement in her eyes than he remembered._ _

__Standing next to the drowned boy, she looks at him almost impassively, and Todd is hit with a hard shot of nothing to be done, like a shroud of peace was placed over his body. He gives in to the presence of her, the presence of that something else, hanging overhead. A cleansing pane of clarity, a step outside his mind. Time disintegrates around him, making sense without movements, closing the loop in the hole of the tapestry, pulling it tight and continuing on. It’s that loop - that stitching, that movement that flows in her eyes as she looks to him. Carrying on, eternally onwards, serpentine._ _

__Todd can see himself then - next to her with the drowned body at his side. Can see himself as she can see him, and he’s half in - half out of the static darkness of the room. This sight, reflected in the dark water of her eyes is what pushes him back out of it._ _

___I can’t be half in - half out,_ his own fractured thoughts, returning as his body sinks, thrashes, weighted down by the pull of ropes and buckles. _If I’m half out then we’re not together, and we’re not getting out._ _ _

__He looks for the house through his mind, and he finds it._ _

__He grits his teeth against the grain of it - the floorboards, the static, the smell again. Stale gasoline, dust and paint, like a faded photo album stained with years, living in damp attic space._ _

__

__Still in the house, Dirk still beside him, crashing with the tide, and Todd finds his arm through the water, snakes his hand around Dirk’s through the dark and locks their fingers together. He can feel Dirk gripping back, but it’s weak, driven back by the force of the pounding water, the static thrum. The pitch of the floor, the ropes casting out behind them, the throat of the house, opening wide to swallow._ _

__Another lungful of water and they’re both going down._ _

__

__“Can’t change the past,” Amanda says. She reaches out, extends her fingers to brush against the drowned boy’s hand as Todd watches. Beside him, Dirk shivers, a sudden wracking motion, and without thinking Todd grips him harder, feeling the bones screaming against the skin of his hand, pulling him back into the room, away from her._ _

__“The only way is forwards.”_ _

__

__Then she’s gone and Todd is twisting - feeling the shoulder restraints digging their metal rings into his skin, and it’s the cold bite of metal and pressure of the straps that brings him back completely._ _

__It grounds him into the moment and severs the fantasy - there’s no maelstrom, no waves, no endless sea - and he grips Dirk impossibly tighter and pushes off from the floor. Eyes clenched closed, he tries to think of sending them forwards - defiant that forwards doesn’t exist anymore after the coursing whirlpool, the upside down and sideways. His mind, his body, both of them all caught up in terrible motion, and they slam into something solid._ _


	14. Leaving the House From Both Ends

They land with twin groans and splitting limbs and Todd realizing that he’s managed to tip them into something new, and that the solid thing they hit seems to be a floor.

He still feels pressure, this time on top of him instead of wrapped around his torso, and he shifts beneath the weight, finding it to be alive and moving too. Dirk’s body on top of his, and the press of the floor beneath them.

Todd’s eyes open and the water, the broken tank, the illusion is all gone, and something new is taking its place. He protests beneath the weight on top of him, but Dirk doesn’t lesson his grip - holding on to Todd much as the straps and buckles were holding on to them both.

“Hey, come on, we’re out, it’s over,” Todd says, the words rushing out from his lungs, pressed like bellows beneath Dirk’s weight. It feels like a lie as he says it, but Dirk slowly shifts, sidling off from him, though not releasing his hand.

Looking around they find themselves in a simple open studio-style room, walls cluttered with framed posters and furniture - all angled normally on the floor. A coffee table set with magazines and coasters, a mirror in a wooden frame against one wall, an armchair with the recliner down. 

Todd sits up, looking around as wildly as he can manage. It’s the simple, ordinary things that sets his radar off, nothing seeming more out of place in the house than something perfectly normal. It doesn’t match them - or they to it - and the out of place sensation grows, doubling and expanding. The illusion and the threat of drowning has retreated, but what remains of it still clings to them. The cold wet shadow of the room, clammy like a stranger’s hand in the way their clothes stick to their bodies.

“Come on,” Todd repeats, spurring himself on and rising awkwardly to his feet, dragging Dirk up with him. Todd tries to turn them, to look for the next route forward, but something stops them. It’s the rope secured at their backs. Farah keeping the line tight, feeding it forward, and this grounds him. A signal from the outside world, proof of it still being there. Reaching backwards, Todd fists the rope in his free hand, pulling hard twice. There’s a pause, and then the line relaxes, spilling out behind them. 

“How long do you think it’s been?” Dirk asks, shuffling nervously against Todd in the room.

“I have no idea,” Todd answers honestly. Hours, easily, given how quickly the light in the sky had fallen on them last time. 

The eerie silence of the room and all of its mundane staples don’t give him any hints. Even here a thin snowfall of dust litters the floors. Paintings on the walls covered in a soft sheen of it, the walls faded and plain.

But where’s the _door?_ Todd rotates again, looking back to Dirk to press him for direction  
only to find Dirk already staring not-quite pointedly in one.

The one thing out of place in the tidy plainness of the room has caught his eye - a smeared trail of yellow paint, a shock of mess against the floor in one corner. 

Paint splashed onto the floor before the mirror, and as Todd looks at it, and then _into_ it the mirror stops reflecting the room they’re in. Instead it displays a new room - and one that Todd recognizes instantly. 

“Hey, that’s my house,” Todd says, voice light in disbelief, and he takes a step towards it. With the movement Dirk suddenly drops his hand, and grabs his arm instead with a fiercely tight grip that sits harsh and narrow on his upper arm.

“What do you mean that’s your house?” The words tumble out in a hot rush.

“My parents’ house, anyway,” Todd amends. “Where I grew up.” Dirk’s grip on his arm loosens slightly, but doesn’t release the line of tension that reaches out from his body into Todd’s.

Looking into the mirror now, Todd can see the ornamental rug his dad had found at a garage sale in Portland, coffee table strewn with his mother’s health and wellness books, the edge of the bookshelf that he had busted his eyebrow open roughhousing with Amanda. All of it immaculate in its lived-in clutter, no detail spared, as if it had been recreated from a photograph his mind had taken. 

“Are you sure?” Dirk asks, and there’s a sprig of terror in his voice that Todd can’t stand, though it matches his feelings about the otherwise ordinary room. Wrongly detached and wildly foreboding. 

“Why, what do you see?” Todd asks, and Dirk looks away from the mirror and towards him instead. Twisting against their restraints, Todd looks back. 

Their bodies are close enough now that Todd suddenly thinks he can see it - the shape of the mirror reflected in Dirk’s eyes, and the shape of the room within it reflected in turn. Caught frozen in his stance, Todd stares, transfixed on the shimmer. 

The reflection is a grey room, with harsh white light flooding down from overhead, plain walls, utilitarian. Todd looks into it with a delirious wave holding his head and sending a waterfall of sensation down his scalp. He’s buzzing like exposed nerves, thinking _maybe_ if I get closer, I could disappear into that room too - and then, terribly, _oh god how many layers could this place have?_

Todd isn’t aware that he’s raising a hand to steady the side of Dirk’s face, his own eyes drinking up the reflection that isn’t a reflection, a stain instead, liquid residue like a mental scar that the house is lapping up, feeding from, and gaining, growing, adding rooms. 

His fingers fan out, tracing a thin line across Dirk’s cheekbones, and in that unconscious motion, Dirk’s eyes shudder closed, trapping the room in a capsule behind his lids and breaking the spell Todd was cast under. 

He pulls his hand away and Dirk’s eyes open. The grey room vanished, only the blue snaking river of Dirk’s irises remaining.

“We have to keep going forwards,” Todd says, shaking off the strange feeling that he’s being transfixed. By the house’s spiral of cerebral rooms, by the coiling spin of Dirk’s eyes as he looks at him. 

“What if we get trapped in there?” Dirk asks, and the grip on Todd’s arm becomes a pleading hold, keeping him from moving towards the mirror-door.

“Then we’ll get un-trapped. We’ve gotten this far,” Todd says, pressing down on the panic and dread trying to rise up from his throat in single file.

“But what if we both go under this time?” Dirk asks. There’s highly frantic element entering his voice now. “You can’t keep pulling me out of things!” 

“Watch me,” Todd says, defiant and crimson. He drags them another inch towards the mirror when Dirk clamps down, a hand on each arm now, opening his mouth for another _what if_ when something snaps inside of Todd. An explosion, popping like M-80’s behind his eyes, dark and furious, like wrath and malice. The collection of his episodes, the rage that’s been pounding in his temples, frothing and stamping with nowhere to go, finally with a target, white knuckles on the release valve. 

“This house is _nothing!_ ” Todd shouts, directing Dirk’s surprised flinch into another step towards the mirrors. “It’s just illusions and memories. It can’t make us actually disappear, it can’t do shit to us!” Dirk’s crushing grip still high up on his arm and Todd leans in to the bite of it, angling them towards the mirror, the glint of the paint on the floor.

“Everyone who went missing went in alone, and we’re not alone. If it could separate us now, it would have by now, and if it _does_ do something to us that we can’t get out of, we’ve got Farah ready to drag us out. So just hold on to me and we’ll get through it.” Todd sucks in a deep breath after the onslaught of words, looking at Dirk with what he can only assume is an insane expression. In front of him, Dirk looks lost. Flushed and reluctant, sweat standing out against his temples, mouth parted open as he breathes shallowly.

Through the pounding of his head, the snare drum of his heartbeat in his chest, Todd can see him look away from him, into the mirror, and then back. In that instance Todd can see something descend into his own vision, pressing into his mind multiple versions of Dirk in front of him.

That image of Dirk in their kitchen, backlit from the struggling light from the streetlamp outside,  
running from one terrible thing to the next, connecting them with strings that no one else sees, with no one staying long enough to see just how the final picture unfolds. 

Dirk next to him in the passenger seat of a beat up car, putting off getting out and coming inside because _sometimes I just need a break from it..._

And another, one that Todd can feel grappling within himself, trying to decide what his role in it was, Dirk saying _sometimes I just want to kiss you._

_I should kiss him now,_ Todd thinks, almost incoherently. _This might be the only chance._ A ripple of shock explodes across Dirk’s expression, and a wave of numbness takes hold of the back of Todd’s head at the sight of it, one last thought before action, and it’s _did I say that out loud?_

Then he closes his eyes, braces against the harness and charges them forward into the unknown.

☞

The room they fall into is jagged. A dark and spreading pattern across the walls, hateful in its rigidity like it’s bristling outwards, spited by Todd’s words and striking out at them. 

“Oh god, what now?” Dirk groans, fighting to regain his balance as Todd gets his own flashlight on, and stumbles while directing it towards the walls. 

“Birds again?” Dirk says next, twisting to look to the wall behind them and scraping the metal buckles on their harnesses as he does. It’s a clanking, grating sound, and as Todd looks at the walls he sees the birds too. His eyes shift, or else the walls do, like the shapes were an image on a screen, transitioning into high definition. 

Spiralling layers of legs, wings, hooked and pointing beaks. Heads twisted at terrible angles from the bodies, stiff with bent feathers jutting out, out and away. 

Something sepia gleams from in between the things. The whole wall blinking back at them with a peculiar shine, like the texture beneath has been painted a different shade from the rest of the room. 

There’s ragged streaks of yellow too. Paint splashed over the macabre mural at the entrance of the room - the doorway through to where they both stand, shoulder to shoulder. 

“That way,” Todd says, eyes snapping towards the flow of the paint along the ground. The arrow, and he wrenches twice on the tightened cable at their backs, feeling the line go from taut to limp after a short pause. 

He goes to move towards the door and is met with the passive resistance of Dirk not moving forwards with him. 

Todd turns as best he can to look at him and is met with an expression warping Dirk’s features into something Todd can’t read. The lighting, the angle, the heartbeat slamming in his chest, all sending blood and drive and a traffic jam of sensations into his head, unwilling to translate the look in Dirk’s eyes. 

It’s far off, but locked into something in that distant place, like he’s disconnected from his presence in the room. That sinking feeling of dread and hopeless pitch is scrambling back into Todd’s body at the sight of it.

_This is it,_ Todd thinks wildly, the water rising again, this time all in his throat. _I’m going to lose him to it again._

But Dirk doesn’t disappear, doesn’t sink into the walls. Instead he steps forward with a light, almost dreamlike motion. He’s caught up on the mural, transfixed with one piece of it, and as Todd watches - is pulled along by the motion - Dirk reaches out towards it, moving cautiously like it might reach back. 

Todd doesn’t want to move towards the wall. The walls where Dirk had been trapped inside, where that bony him-shaped tunnel had revealed itself. He wants to be stubborn and dig his heels into the floor, but he can’t bring himself to. Instead he gives his body in to the path of Dirk’s trance, edging them closer to the wall. 

Dirk’s close enough to touch the thing now, and so he does - featherlight and his fingers flinch back in an automated response, but the piece on the wall doesn’t react. 

“There’s another door,” Todd says, tugging Dirk away from the wall with his words.  
Dirk shifts his head incrementally towards Todd’s voice, but doesn’t break his gaze with the mural until Todd tugs at his harness.

“Dirk,” and then he seems to snap out of it, blinking and backing away from the wall, shaking his head softly.

“Another door?” Dirk says, a belated response but Todd takes it, urging him along in that direction. 

The door carved into the far wall stands slotted in a direct parallel to the door they had arrived through. The light from Todd’s beam doesn’t reach that far, and as they move towards it - Todd determined and Dirk begrudgingly beside him - it leers like a mouth, opening wide to let them in with a ready want.

☞

It’s not a room the mouth lures them into then but another hall. This one empty, and angled, and the downward pitch of the floor snakes a stretching line of tightness up the backs of Todd’s legs, as well as a confused pull in his mind. 

The rope is still scattered out behind them, firmly attached to the loops of their harnesses and stringing upwards, so the visible slope of this new hall claws queasily at Todd’s stomach. The image of them digging through the earth at some new and backwards angle feels wrong, making his head spin in a vertigo clutch.

Dirk seems to feel it too, and he presses his shoulder cautiously into Todd’s, leaning on him as they descend. Todd’s flashlight is traces figure eights across the blank walls, but nothing glints back at them, sharp or frightening. The sight of nothing doesn’t help the slanted, grey uneasy feelings though, and when Dirk presses in closer to him Todd reaches for his hand and latches on to it without thinking. 

The room the sloping hallway leads into is square and grey. the paint on the walls not peeling and possibly non-existent entirely, just slabs of raw concrete, smooth and plain. There’s light here too, muted white and tossing shadows down the walls. A dotted yellow line runs down the middle of the floor, not beaked arrow tips now but just uniform rectangular dashes, and Todd is inexplicably thinking of loading docks, transport routes and open freeways. 

Two doorways stand on the far wall, evenly spaced from each other and from the connecting walls. The frames around them are matte-black, wide enough to let a vehicle pass into, machine access style like they’re in the bunker of some immense warehouse.

These doors are firmly built and closed too, not just open sockets leading in to the next room like veins. The doors look newly installed in that same flat grey to match the walls, bolts and carved lines along their edges, fresh to match the paint along the floor that practically glistens under the pale light.

_Did any of the other rooms have doors?_ Todd thinks suddenly, certain he’s speaking only inside his head, his molars holding his tongue in a firm clamp. He finds he’s unable to conjure up a visual of the rooms that preluded this now, everything stirring up grey and morphing, like his mind is being eroded. 

They’re halfway through the room now, and on the floor just in front of the doors is a weird ripple, wet looking but washed out like an old water stain, or gasoline waves on damp concrete.

Both doors they’re approaching step by carefully placed step are adorned with something. The left door on Todd’s side holds a metal ring, neatly centred. Inside the ring is comically stitched embroidery to match the postcard that had disappeared inside his pocket - _HOME SWEET HOME_ with matching rosebuds along the edge, looking wildly out of place next to the other which reads - 

“‘Maintenance Access...?’” Todd says aloud, and Dirk stiffens beside him. 

“You see that too?” Dirk asks sharply. Todd tries to turn to look at him, but the tangling of their cords make it difficult. 

“Grey concrete door, yellow letters?” Todd asks, and Dirk grimaces, giving a confirming nod. 

“Great. So which one?” Todd asks, and Dirk takes a shuffling step forward. 

“It...that doesn’t make sense,” Dirk starts to mutter. “Doesn’t make sense, why would _you_ be seeing that?”

“What do you mean?” Todd asks, side-stepping along beside him. “What does the other one look like?”

“I don’t know,” Dirk says back, venom fast. “I don’t know what anything in here looks like, do you see that mark on the floor?”

“Yeah,” Todd says, looking down at it now. They’re practically on top of it, but neither have taken the final step to cross them over it. Closer now, the floor looks raised, like the concrete hadn’t been damaged by water but scarred somehow, or burned like skin, and Todd has a gnawing feeling that if he were to reach down, the floor here would be warm like the walls, the tank had been. Clammy and body temperature, and would sink and roll if prodded. 

“There’s just a that-coloured shape on the other door,” Dirk says, and his fingers pull a little closer into the grip Todd has on them. “It’s like...a lack of a shape, rather.”

Todd looks back at the door, and for a second thinks he can see what Dirk sees - a cigarette burn vacant hole in the washed out grey, an empty hole that bores into the nothingness behind it. But then it recedes, outlining the embroidery hoop again, filling the void with something painfully ordinary, recognizable but just as disconnected as the rest of it. Closer to it now, creeping, inches closer, Todd can hear something coming from behind it now too. Distant music, like the kind caught between stations on long drives. He can almost make out the words - something he’s heard before, something from a long time ago, something filtered through speakers, maybe carnival rides, late nights, he can feel himself in the back of his parent’s car, a child again, being lured off to sleep by the rhythm of the road, the voices through the speakers.

He wants to be closer to this feeling, and Dirk is moving along beside him, just as forward, but not towards the same door as him. Despite the music, the stretching out of the road, Todd can feel Dirk moving towards that other door, and feels his own body turn towards that motion. The slight change in his angle feels like something else is choosing to move for him, or not choosing at all, but steering him, steering them forwards. One more creeping step forward and this one brings them over the rippling line of the floor.

Todd’s body lurches, the strangled haze of his thoughts leaping from his mind down his throat and then it’s gone. His stomach not so much dropping but tumbling, and his vision tumbles too, head caught up in a disarray of shapes and noises, and then nothing. The music has lifted, the dread not vanished, but replaced with a more worried sort of wariness. As Todd catches his bearings, he finds it feels like the inverse of that first disorienting threshold into the house.

“I think we’re not in the house anymore,” Todd says with this realization. He can feel more than he can see the act of Dirk reaching towards the door on his side. 

“I think you’re right,” Dirk says slowly, and Todd frowns. The tone of his voice is so low and uneasy that it shatters any aspect that feeling not-inside the house was a potential good thing.

There’s no handle to the doors - Todd can see this now as Dirk raises his free hand to the concrete in front of him, painted with yellow block letters. The door itself looks impossibly heavy, solid as a stone, but as Dirk places his palm flat against what should be concrete the whole thing blinks out - doesn’t vanish or change but simply ceases to exist.

Todd’s flashlight nudges through the door with them, but proves to be unnecessary. The area behind the door is another long corridor, this time wide and barren, but also well lit. The air feels sharper, filtered clean and processed, and Todd can see air ducts and piping lining the ceilings too - more things, more structure than the house had shown them.

There’s no more of that tremulous shifting, but the raw emptiness of the concrete corridor seems to stretch out and grin with a starved ferocity back at them. They’ve drawn to a stop now and Todd tries uselessly to shake off the feeling that they’re behind enemy lines, cast out from whatever the house had been doing to their minds, but still hopelessly out of their depth. 

Todd is about to voice this, to ask Dirk _what now?_ when he turns to him and sees this hollowed out cave of terror eating away at Dirk’s face.

Dirk turns away from the bleakness of the walls to look at him. The pale fear has taken over his expression, and in the new light two patches of flushed skin streak high up on his cheeks. The redness and the narrow darting of his tongue against is lips is lit up in a hue that affects Todd’s breathing, each exhale like a nervous tide, a growing sense of _something’s wrong._

But still, there’s Amanda’s voice in his head, saying _forwards,_ and Dirk seems to hear it too in some hidden way, and they both continue on down the hall. 

“Fuck, okay, let me try something,” Dirk says with a tremor, shutting his eyes and holding them firmly closed with a hand across his face. “Go around that corner.”

“Okay,” Todd says, pulling the shape of them across the floors. The next stretch of hallway yawns open before them, just as empty, just as daunting. The storm inside his lungs is growing, sea levels rising, sails whipping open. 

“The wall next to the next door, the left side, what do you see?” Dirk is hissing at his side. Todd’s head snaps to follow the direction, understanding in a distant way what Dirk’s doing, testing out the illusions of the house, though Todd feels in a way he can’t explain how they left all those tricks behind once they crossed that strange ripple on the floor.

“An emergency hatch, looks like one of those fabric hose things, and a release valve,” Todd says numbly.

“Great,” Dirk replies. It sounds tinny, and high up in his throat. 

“Okay, so you know where we are, what does that mean?” Todd asks, twisting to look at him. The buckles at his back nip at him as he turns, gleeful in the suspense of Dirk’s answer, and when it comes it confirms the horrible nausea swell inside his lungs.

“We’re in Blackwing.”  
☞

“That one, there, what’s that way?” Todd asks, pointing to a door at random. He’s suddenly starving for a real layout, inside knowledge of where they are and where they’re going. 

“I don’t know, Todd,” Dirk says in a rush, barely looking at the door Todd had pointed at, tugging them further down the hallway in a nervous canter. 

“What about one of those? Is there another way out?”

“I _don’t know,_ Todd. We all had separate rooms in separate wings, and we were escorted to other areas to be tested. We weren’t given free range of the place.” 

Todd drops his arm, thinking he should probably apologize for pressing. Instead he looks around the area they’re sneaking through.

“Jesus, how are we even here?” He asks. It may as well been just to himself, because Dirk doesn’t answer.

Concrete floors, walls, ceilings. Lights in white strips along the top, blaring down and stinging his eyes that had adjusted to the surges of dull darkness of the previous rooms. Decidedly vacant and bare, and not unlike a hospital in how flat and empty the room sat, not pretending to be passive like the earlier rooms had been, but structurally observant. Created for strict purpose, no time for details or decor. And maybe it’s coming from Dirk, or from his own experience over the last few days, but there’s a hostility. Something sharp beneath the mundane grey. Boring, but with a crushing weight to the walls, like a parking garage with teeth. 

They carry down the hall, matching the same briskly uneven pace until they get to a set of double doors blocking the continuation of the long, open hall they’re in. At the sight of them Dirk freezes up, jerking to a stop like a horse balking at a bridge over running water.

“We have to go back,” Dirk says suddenly, and it’s not fear controlling his voice but a sharp spike of decisive command. It’s a tone that Todd knew if he questioned he’d be answered with a helplessly cross dismissal. _I couldn’t tell you_ how _I know, but I know,_ and he knows better than to argue with him.

“Okay,” Todd says in place of anything contrary, and Dirk takes a relieved step backwards, letting Todd angle their bodies to face the way they came. 

Once they’ve reversed their direction, Dirk takes over of their path, and Todd lets him. Springing on his heels, Dirk whips them back along the route they’d taken, moving with a confidence that isn’t quite that he knows what he’s doing, but that he’s given himself over to some other sense. 

It’s familiar, and a strange comfort amid the structured concrete labyrinth. Todd tries to hone in on this now, blocking out all the same greyness blurring along the edges of his vision as they move, turning around corners and passing closed doors. They’ve fallen into the closest thing to a graceful run, all the while Todd keeps trying to remove the thought from his head that they’re like rabbits fleeing a collapsing burrow. 

Then, from behind them, the sound of something large swinging open.

“Shit, what was that?” Todd gasps out, his mind already supplying the fresh image of those double doors, of Dirk’s refusal to let them through.

“Todd, if we don’t leave now we’re not getting out at all, only it’s not going to be the house that catches us.” Dirk says it in one swift breath, holding on to one of Todd’s arms with both hands now, and leaning the entirety of his weight in the opposite direction. 

“Alright, alright,” Todd says, twisting back with him and turning their backs to the source of the sound. He feels entirely exposed from that angle now, the back of his neck insisting that whatever was behind them was still approaching. And continues approaching. The sound has been replaced by heavy footsteps now, thick rubber against concrete, a weighted, purposeful run. 

The wide open darkness behind the twin doors is right in front of them now. The collapsed line of rope on the floor leading back through the door they had come through. They reach it and crash through with Todd wondering dully what would happen if they went back through the other door - the one with distant music, the one neatly stitched to greet him. 

There’s no music playing now. Instead, the rope stretches out before them. It trails along the floor, tangling around them, chasing them from the corridor until it reaches back to the scarring ripple against the floor. And here it leaps straight up into the air - the unlit, warping ceiling, like they had dropped in from a great height.

“Not this again, _not this again,”_ Dirk moans, shaking his head violently enough to knock Todd off balance, caught off guard staring up at their lifeline. 

“How are we getting up that thing?” Todd asks, again to himself, in one slithering mouthful. Beside him, Dirk is jerking in frenzied agitation against their harnesses. 

“It’s all in my head, it’s all in my head,” he starts repeating, suddenly folding in half and crouching against the floor, doubled over. The footsteps behind them have grown to a steady roar now, practically vibrating the floor, and Todd has barely grasped what Dirk’s doing until he yanks upwards. Using his leverage to surges forwards, dragging Todd’s weight into his action, Dirk’s now running at skewed angle, away from the ascending rope and towards a blank and solid looking wall. 

Todd’s heart is lodged in his throat, high up enough that he can taste it, like copper and strained retching panic. He throws himself into the direction Dirk has swept them in, towards the wall, while all behind them now he can hear voices, robotic and blaring, _BREACH, BREACH, BREACH._

☞

Back again in the jagged room, they jar to a stop as Todd struggles to dig out his flashlight, aiming it around the room in seasick loops.

“Can they follow us in here?” Todd asks. His breath feels caught up in his mouth, refusing to be swallowed.

“No idea. But they’ll certainly try,” Dirk says back. His eyes are already being swept off away from Todd, away from the way they’ve come.

It sits where they had left it on the wall - the wing that Dirk had been transfixed with. Panting before the twisted mural, Todd has a strange notion that it’s speaking to the other man, calling out to him in a voice that Todd can’t hear. He lets Dirk rush them towards it now, and doesn’t question when Dirk reaches out and pulls it from the wall.

The feathers glint up at him as Todd looks at it, shining with an odd flicker like bad CGI. Just as the comparison solidifies in his mind, it vanishes, flickering out in an instant.

“Oh,” Dirk says from soft drags of breath. “That’s where they are.” 

“What?” Todd asks, pressing in closer to Dirk’s side. He can’t process the thing in Dirk’s hands anymore. It’s not a wing, but a flattened bar of more of that shadowed static. Formless, removed from his perception.

“Everyone who went missing in here,” Dirk answers. It’s not an answer to Todd, but the frightening lilt of something heavy like despair suggests that it is. 

“Solved it,” Dirk says next in one crushed exhalation. The wing is cradled in his hands, and as Todd watches, Dirk raises it, cupping his fingers around it delicately and turning it to the side. 

As Todd looks at the thing, all superimposed ideas that it was ever part of a bird are chased from his mind by the solid, solemn way Dirk is holding it. Not a bird but a bone, and looking away from it and back up to the walls, Todd can see they’re all bones, not feathers or wings or taloned feet. Jus the smooth off-white shape of bones, each one a piece of an arm or leg, ribcages and skulls, splayed up protruding from the walls, arranged in rippling, curving lines like the inner side of shells, or eels’ teeth. 

“I think it’s digested them somehow,” Dirk says, a small quake to his fingers still holding the bone. “Or maybe this is just what’s left that it can’t use.” 

Todd’s not sure why he gets the feeling next, but it’s given - it seems to reach up towards him from Dirk’s body. This curious urge, nagging like some deep itch to pull all the pieces from the wall. Not to examine but to exhume - bring them all back up to the surface.

But there isn’t time, backing away from the wall now is taking a step closer to whatever it is that’s coming up behind them, and Todd doesn’t want that either. The sound keeps coming and it’s garbled now. Twisted, maybe morphing with the rooms, heavy footsteps that sound like heartbeats pounding through the walls. 

They turn again, and Todd catches sight of the walls from a different angle, and sees that strangely disjointed layer again. The dusted gleam of something shimmering underneath, some mirage inside his head, curling like a layer of faded wallpaper. They’re turning, looking for some escape, then Todd blinks and it becomes a wall of photographs inside his eyes. A faded embroidery, fading faster now, fading like a memory, home sweet home - and Dirk is rushing at his side, breathing hard and gasping out _there isn’t time, we’re not going to make it,_ and then Todd is tangling with the rope now in front of them, gathering it in large loops with both hands, and pulling as hard as he’s able, just once. 

There’s a hissing, whirring sound as the rope begins to pull from his hands, whipping back towards their original path, faster than a zipline. Then Todd is bracing, dropping it before it burns his hands, grabbing hold of Dirk’s instead, and squeezing his eyes shut. 

☞

When Todd opens his eyes next it’s to the gust of cool night air and Farah, lit up in the glow of orange headlights, her hair and hands like flame overtop of them. Dirk beside him on the ground, twisted and groaning, cursing at the spread of dust and gravel beneath their bodies. 

The stars are popping out against the night, grinning in lustre and spinning above them as Farah wrestles them away from the front door, and in turn wrestles the harnesses off from their bodies. 

Then they’re all upright, though staggering. They only have to cross the few meters to the car, though Todd’s legs feel like liquid, unwilling to hold up. Beside him, Dirk is moving in a similar state, teetering wildly to one side without the secure hold of the straps, and when he casts an arm out to find some kind of balance Todd reaches out and pulls hold of it, drawing him close.

It’s late. The day long since dead and night had unwrapped itself to line the streets and buildings in a velvet blackness. Half crescent grooves etch the underside of Farah’s eyes, but her resolve sits uncracked, unphased by whatever time it could be. She juts a shoulder beneath Todd’s other arm, hoists him further upright. 

By the time they get situated inside the car - Farah driving, Todd and Dirk glued together in the back - Dirk’s already talking. Spouting out a frenzied recap, his face alit with a toxic flush that Todd finds too familiar to be worrisome.

_“Blackwing?”_ Farah’s saying, spitting the name from her mouth like it’s burnt. “I barely fed half of the first cable in after you. Fifty feet, tops.” 

Beside Todd, Dirk gives him a bewildered stare. It’s closely followed by a miserable shrug, a harsh exhale. _Anything goes,_ Todd thinks back helplessly. He’s certain at this point he’d believe anything, and disbelieve too with the same certainty.


	15. The End

Dirk disappears into the apartment in a beeline for the shower as soon as the door is opened. There’s an electricity to his posture that negates the hour. Todd can’t match the energy, but he understands the drive behind it. The desire to wash it all off, to be rid of something. 

Instead, Todd joins Farah in the main room of the agency. She sits down heavily on the couch, the air rushing out of the cushions and her lungs to match. Todd copies her, feeling the jolt of his shoulders and the protesting bite of where the straps had encircled his chest. He wants to look to her, to thank her properly, but his eyes get stuck on the small pile of clothes and boxes tucked away in the corner of the room. 

“You okay?” Todd asks. In the wake of everything it feels absurd, and strangely formal to say.

“I’ve been trying to make sense of it...” Farah says, letting the end of her sentence trail into a look that she extends from the open windows to Todd. He tears his gaze away from the items on the floor and returns it.

She’s looking him over with an intensity he can’t hide from. It’s searching, analyzing, and she seems to be content with what she finds, and he looks back at her with as much expectancy as he can manage. There’s something there, boring its way out of her, and despite the hour, the darkness outside - and the connection he still feels behind his eyes to those sprawling rooms - he wants to hear it. And in the way she’s looking at him now, he knows she can recognize this. 

“I got caught up with those old cases in the library,” she begins, and Todd sags back into the couch. His body hurts, but the ache of his muscles still won’t fully relax, still buzzing on that high alert as if something’s left undone. 

“All those firsthand accounts, townsfolk who talked about monsters, ghosts, things appearing that couldn’t _possibly_ exist... Someone had called it a portal into hell - they had ended up institutionalized, obviously. And obviously I couldn’t find anything _concrete_ about it, but I really fell down a rabbit hole about ghost sightings and the ‘science’ of it.” She says _science_ like the context of it had personally offended her, but at the same time keeps talking with a sort of hushed reverence. Todd’s mind feels botched, like he’s beginning the slow and rocky come down from questionable substances. The way she’s talking makes him think of campfires and deep forests, and he can almost smell the woodsmoke. 

“The general consensus says that when something bad happens, or an event triggers a large amount of collective suffering, then an imprint is left behind. But there’s nothing that would count as real evidence of that imprint, other than everyone who’s gone in saying pretty much the same thing...” Farah trails off. She’s looking out the window now, but Todd doubts that she’s taking anything in. He can practically hear the whirring of her mind from his spot beside her, looking for an antidote to the muddled mess they hauled back out of the house. It swirls through the air, refusing to settle. Farah turns away from the window then. She looks at him now, searching for some answer, some key to help puzzle her way through the tangled yarn of unknowns and unexplained. But Todd doesn’t have a key.

“I’m trying not to give it that much thought,” he says simply, letting his eyes take the spot her gaze had left, chasing cars down the street. They sit like that for a while.

“I don’t think it’s attached to Blackwing at all,” Farah says next. There’s a weight to her words, chosen careful and laid out with intention.

“You don’t?” Todd asks, eyes stalling in the road. “After everything they’ve proved to be capable of?” It’s fully dark outside, and for a heartbeat he sees a boy instead, floating in a tank of water, then vanishing. 

“I don’t think - despite their capabilities in _doing_ awful things, they haven’t showed much resilience in creating or controlling awful things,” she replies. 

One of those awful things lingers in the hallway, unsure of whether or not to enter. 

Todd motions for him to come, extends a gesture to the empty side of couch beside him. Dirk smiles easily, clean again but he doesn’t join them yet. It’s not aversion to company, and Todd can see that now. Liberty. How sometimes not choosing can be a choice too. 

“What’s your best take on it, then?” Todd asks. Farah looks at him, considering for a moment, hand picking her words, and the ones she chooses surprises him.

“I think it’s just haunted,” she says. There’s an air of defeat being admitted to her words, giving herself over to the current instead of arching back against it. “Or rather, everyone who enters it is.”

“Haunted,” Todd repeats flatly, wishing it didn’t sound acceptable, and that it didn’t fit the feeling that still hung on to his skin. 

“Is that still hard to believe?” Farah asks. She’s not just asking it to him. 

The thought of ghosts weighs too heavily on Todd, and he wants to banish the contemplation.   
He gets up, maybe just to prove he’s still there. Flesh and blood, still living and operating in a warm body. 

It’s hard to swallow, even harder to process. Not just the existence of ghosts - they seem almost mundane in comparison, though maybe sadder than what he’s seen before. But the existence of things that weren’t designed with them in mind, with a reasonable outcome and explanation. It feels like the death of some naiveté within himself, and he can feel a stubborn fit rising internally, demanding that they track back to it, demanding in turn that the house explains itself to them. He wants a conclusion, wants all the pieces to fall together and make sense. Completion. Saturday morning cartoons where masks get peeled off and there’s someone responsible, ready to be held accountable. 

Instead he’s left with the greasiness of reality, ever sliding and staining and changing form.  
A reality where portals and time machines and monsters lay in wait, and a haunting hardly breaches the surface of implausible. A reality where people put more masks on instead of taking them off. 

“I think it’s feeding on it’s occupants. And everything that’s been haunting them,” Farah says. Her words flow into his stream of distant thought. Todd’s eyes feel blurred, skimming past Farah and melting into her computer screen. Scanned newspaper clippings and testimonies from so many years ago and counting blink back at him. People with shapes in their past that made the house look like a sanctuary. People who had slipped into it without a fight.

“Building with them,” Dirk says from beside him and Todd’s eyes blur into him next. Dirk didn’t have a conclusion either. He just has what Todd has too, what Farah had witnessed from the crowd. The smouldering remains of a terrible night, and it keeps burning now, duetted by the crackling of the fire pit in Todd’s head, smoke rising from the ashes of the night.

“What do we tell Jolie Silberman?” Todd asks next. He’s remembering the look in her eyes, fierce in their suspense to match the walls of the house her sister had vanished into. 

“I don’t know,” Dirk says simply. “We’ll figure something out.” 

“You should get some rest,” Dirk adds pointedly to Farah and she yawns, loud and appreciative without argument. She heads down the darkened hallway with Todd’s thoughts narrating her exit. He’s imagining her standing in the bath of headlights unchanged for hours. Tense and angled, facing off with an empty house, staring down a trailing line of cable. Steady, and solid, confident in her ability to take them home again.

Now alone with Dirk in the dark of the agency room, Todd doesn’t feel like any of those things. Instead he feels worn, dotted with holes like a torn fence. A little washed out, his pulse caught in a stutter after so much running. And there’s something else, some unravelled end of the night still waiting to be closed off, though Todd can’t put a name to it. Dirk can, he figures. The lord of unfinished things, and everything Todd finds impossible to figure out. 

Next to him, holding the spot that Farah’s shadow had washed over in the doorway, Dirk looks over at him. He’s lowered now, in pitch and intensity, miles away from that onslaught of words and that fast, jolted energy, though he still moves restlessly like he’s mulling something over, and Todd waits for it to come to the surface.

“I think that all the branches of Blackwing, all that misery they’ve caused...” Dirk starts, then stops again, eyes sliding across the floor in front of him like he’s trying to pull so many different pieces from his mind, and arrange them in a way that makes sense. “Over thirty of us... all just _kept_ in there. That’s a lot of collective suffering. A lot of the same route through that house.”

“All leading to the same place,” Todd fills in. They’re both silent for a while, together in a breath of stillness. 

“Do you think that there’s different...veins, of that place? Different halls or windows that lead to the same spots, all over the world?” Dirk fans his arms out, curling his fingers in a helpless motion as he tries to articulate something determined to stay wordless. The gesture reaches outwardly to Todd, and Todd responds by pulling his forearm from the air, holding it between his hands. 

“I guess so,” Todd says. Imprints left behind, with bad things happening anywhere, he supposes that any place could reach out through that darkness, and connect into the root of it. _This place too,_ Todd’s thinking, his fingers moving in a slow trace across the skin of Dirk’s wrist. _Any place at all, if we’re not careful._

He can see it then, expanding behind his bloodshot eyes. Roots of some great and terrible tree  
stretching out beneath the planet’s surface. Extending like tendrils, reaching for tender pockets in the dark corners of the world’s eye. It rolls and coils like some reverse of the fabric cosmos he had seen, standing with Amanda. Trenches instead, rivers running along the underneath. 

The house doesn’t feel like it’s just outside the door now, but an itch persists beneath Todd’s skin. He takes a breath, lets it go, and waits for it to subside. He wants to go back. The simple thought startles him, wracking beneath the weight of how late it is, how much they’ve seen. But he simply does. Wants another attempt to make it make sense, all while knowing it so easily couldn’t, that it could just _be._ Complete in the way it was, even with all the morphing, all those warping walls. 

Todd’s left feeling like Dirk’s original urge to go charging in headfirst is infectious, some life-from that jumps from host to viable host. And now, in the wake of everything it’s spread to him. He hopes that means it could leave Dirk content to turn his back on what is known and out there. It doesn’t feel like it will, though. It feels sharp-toothed and barbed with unfriendly things. Every conscious choice to not look back torn apart by that nerve-deep compulsion to always turn and look.

Dirk shifts then, not removing his arm from Todd’s light grasp, but twisting it slightly. It’s a mirrored movement of how he had turned the bone from the wall between his own hands, and he settles again this time facing Todd. 

“What you said in the house, before the room with all the bones,” Dirk starts, and he’s pulling at the hem of his shirt in a nervous twisting motion. There’s a delicate hesitance to his voice, and his eyes too, coasting over Todd’s figure in the darkened room. He falters then, drawing back on his own words like he’s suddenly not sure of them. 

“At least I think you said it...” he’s backing away now, not with his body but with some other part of his presence, and Todd wants to draw him back, to finish whatever it is that’s demanding to be finished. Dirk is still there - Todd can see him carved from shadows in the room, but can see him elsewhere too. The way he had stood in the kitchen, the light falling in around him, an aura at his back and shadows on his face. Todd wants to break the uncertainty that’s trying to cloak Dirk now. That angry, red-lined part of him that simmers low and deep inside wants so badly to be angry with himself for not saying something better at the time, wants to do it right now. He’s nearly knocked back again by that crushing wave of not knowing what it is that’s expected of him. 

“When you said - if you said - that it might be your only chance...?” Dirk’s words lead reluctantly, but then trail off again, his eyes getting trapped in Todd’s own gaze and locking up, searching for something through the shadows. 

“It wasn’t,” Dirk finishes, now in a breathless whisper, like if he just sighs the words out he can take them back. Todd doesn’t know what it is that Dirk’s seeing in his eyes. Tidal waves, maybe. Some force he can’t control. A crashing wall, the weight of water, the brunt of that useless feeling that’s been plaguing him. The rush of two conflicting tides - _this is where you’re meant to be_ and never knowing what it is that’s required of him once he’s there. They crest, they cave, and Todd leans in towards him, the only thing left to do. 

Dirk’s mouth parts open in silent surprise as Todd dips up to close the distance between them. To match, Todd is startled that they survived it all just to end up like this. Todd shuts his eyes, defiant to brace against the images wrestling though his memory, and presses his mouth against Dirk’s.

Dirk presses back soft with no resistance, and sighs into him. There’s still a conflict raging inside of Todd, even as he kisses him. Great lurches of panic, the aftershocks of all that underlaying dread, but Todd gathers all of it together, drowns it in the familiarity of Dirk standing in front of him. Dirk’s mouth is soft, moving readily against his own with the smooth pliancy of candle wax, a small flame in the dark room. 

When Todd draws back again, Dirk’s eyes reopen and his gaze falls onto the floor between them. There’s a faint smile curving upwards from his tilted face and for a moment they don’t look at each other, just at the shadowed space of tiles at their feet. Dirk seems unwilling to move, as if the slightest shift or motion would change something, spoil it.

Todd thinks he understands the feeling - can replicate a match inside his own chest. There’s a warmth, but there’s a fear too - like the ceiling above them held the potential to crack open like a hinged lid, divide the contents of the apartment, all of it vanished again. But the ceiling doesn’t open. The room doesn’t alter or disappear, the quiet breathing between them the only sound. 

The walls around them feel finite, almost feeble in their fixed shape. The dark and the time on the clock wrap around this structure, blurring it, softening the edges.

“Can we sleep together?” Dirk asks, then tries to backpedal immediately. A high flush is pulsing from his heartbeat to his face - they’re close enough that Todd can feel it. “I - didn’t mean in the sense...just that - ”

“I know what you meant,” Todd cuts him off, and Dirk looks relieved, and unbelievably tired. 

Todd opts for a shower first, letting the water jet against the forming knots in his back as the steam rises up around him. Dirk’s already in his bed when Todd exits, changed into something clean, that underground smell finally gone, lost in the pealing droplets that line the bathroom tiles now.

Todd enters the room, his path distorted with a gentle sort of deja vu. Clicking the door shut behind him he parts through the shadows to the bed, and Dirk sits up to pull the blankets down over the top of them, settling back against the pillows. It’s not until Todd settles in next to him, gives in to the shy curl of Dirk’s fingers against his own that it finally feels over. 

☞

The window behind Dirk’s bed is lit up by the amber glow of the lamps on the street outside. Above them now, the glowing current of fate and stars have never felt closer or quite so low. Todd has to push the lines of his body down into the mattress, to become as flat and as still as possible beneath the power of it. It presses down, and Todd feels pressed to say more, to unearth and rip out all the times he hadn’t said something, though even now he feels the storm inside. Turmoil, not knowing what it is that needed to be said at all. It’s a haunted feeling. 

“I’m sorry,” Todd finally says, filling the space between them with words he’s not certain of. “I’m sorry about the boy in the tank. I’m sorry that we couldn’t get him out too.” 

The smile Dirk offers up is haunted too, numb around the edges and as silent as an empty house. 

“He got out in another way,” he says, and Todd doesn’t like how the words fit in his mouth. There’s a slow wave of silence again, and Dirk sighs as it crests. “He adapted to the house he was in.” 

Todd nods, understanding in a way that feels shallow, like some old memory too damaged with time to be crisp anymore. It’s childhood overgrown. He doesn’t know what words to say to counteract the spreading of the weeds. 

The street lamps warp and bleed into the glass. It’s ghost light collecting to filter in between the gaps. The spaces between memories too, and between people.

It spreads with a coldness. No violence to it, no hungry want, just cold emptiness in the absence of something. A small wound, a catch in the fabric - not something to be filled but something to be closed up. 

Dirk shifts in the dark, something close to restless still holding to his body. Todd almost asks if he’s alright, to move in a reflexive jolt. 

But it feels almost clinical, to throw a hollow question like a stone against the pane of cold light. Useless to insist, now that he’s seen the shape of things inside. Felt the water and the wound. 

Instead he pulls in closer. His arms move out and Dirk’s do too, threading their bodies together like a doctor pulling stitches in tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (/Truce/)
> 
> The chasing footsteps that followed them back through doors get wound through more doors, through rooms and halls and rooms again without a guiding rope to draw back out again.   
> From the bowels of Blackwing, more footsteps follow. They’re slow, heavy, methodically placed by expendable soles, and eventually a line is sketched that births them out through that first door, into an empty lot that holds nothing but a fine and crawling dust.   
> A perimeter is set up. Admission is not permitted.   
> The spread of the fences outline a path and the paced shifts of the guards follow it.  
> Neither stray out of the sight of the house. With its closed door and its unbroken windows. 
> 
> Away from the lot and its new fascinators the nightmares eventually dwindle, though never really die off. Through the agency doors come new questions and riddles - more lines to cast off.   
> The itch to come back to the sprawling rooms fades. Not entirely but to some place far away, like distant music.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Facing the House](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26789296) by [chopwood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chopwood/pseuds/chopwood)
  * [The Room Before The Wall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27121507) by [Zietegeest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zietegeest/pseuds/Zietegeest)




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